A process improvement program starts with the recognition of the organization’s needs and business goals, usually based on the main drivers and stimuli identified. From an analysis of the organizations needs and existing stimuli for improvement, the objectives of process improvement are identified and described. The final stage of the preliminary definition of the goals for the improvement prog...

Humanitarian professionals continue to seek best practice guidelines for famine relief. Many emergency interventions in developing countries draw on recent lessons from the 20 century, but attention has also been paid to historical experiences such as the 19 century evolution of India’s Famine Codes and responses to Ireland’s famine of the 1840s. This article goes further back in time to examin...

The purpose of this paper is to present research in progress concerning barriers to sharing information in Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SME‟s). The work will examine the barriers to sharing in the newly emerging economies of Poland and Hungary with the relatively established economy of the UK. The results of the study will be used to from a model of “best practice” for SME‟s who are sett...

This paper compares parametric and non-parametric estimates of productivity change in European banking between 1994 and 2000. Productivity growth has also been further decomposed into technological change, or change in best practice, and efficiency change. Both the parametric and non-parametric approaches consistently identify those systems that have benefited most (and least) from productivity...

Requirements specification has long been acknowledged as an area for further research in the development of systems, particularly for those that are computer based. In addition, an IEEE White Paper by Tripp and Keane indicates that current practice regarding System Dependability is in large part based on “tricks of the trade”, and that there is a need to codify “best practices”. This paper atte...

 The authors would like to thank the European Agency for Reconstruction for access to their data and their kind support. ABSTRACT Different procurement decisions taken by relief organizations can result in considerably different implications in regards to transport, storage, and distribution of humanitarian aid and ultimately can influence the performance of the humanitarian supply chain and t...

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