Quality management represents company-wide activities to improve the quality level of products and works through customer orientation, continuous quality improvement, employees’ involvement, etc. to establish and sustain a competitive advantage. This paper presents result of an empirical analysis on quality management practices and its impact on competitive performance in Japanese manufacturing...

OBJECTIVE This study aimed to provide an overview of the development, content, feasibility, and effectiveness of existing orientation and mobility training programmes in the use of the identification cane. DATA SOURCES A systematic bibliographic database search in PubMed, PsychInfo, ERIC, CINAHL and the Cochrane Library was performed, in combination with the expert consultation (n = 42; orien...

Deformations of timber, caused mainly by anisotropic shrinkage, can be partially directed by controlling annual ring orientation through different sawing patterns. Ring orientation also affects the movement of water from within the board to its surface, with rapidity of drying having implications for the wood colour. Here sawn silver birch (Betula pendula Roth) timber was classed into two group...

Two quantitative meta-analyses examined how the presence of visual channels, vocal channels, and synchronicity influences the quality of outcomes in negotiations and group decision making. A qualitative review of the literature found that the effects of communication channels vary widely and that existing theories do not sufficiently account for these contradictory findings. To parsimoniously e...

Orientation field, representing the fingerprint ridge structure direction, plays a crucial role in fingerprint-related image processing tasks. Orientation field is able to be constructed by either non-parametric or parametric methods. In this paper, the advantages and disadvantages regarding to the existing non-parametric and parametric approaches are briefly summarized. With the further invest...

In the present work, we perform molecular dynamics simulations corroborated by experimental validations to elucidate the underlying deformation mechanisms of single-crystalline aluminum under direct imprint using a rigid silicon master. We investigate the influence of crystallographic orientation on the microscopic deformation behavior of the substrate materials and its correlation with the mac...