Application of the IEC80001 standard towards integration of a real time alarm communication and management system

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 397-411 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyle Eckhardt ◽  
Andrew Hayes ◽  
Michael Hamilton ◽  
Tidimogo Gaamangwe

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on use of the IEC80001 standard, Application of Risk Management for Information Technolody (IT) Networks Incorporating Medical Devices, to deploy a wireless alarm management solution in a long-term care home facility. Design/methodology/approach – The standard suggests the use of a unique responsibility matrix and a continuous quality improvement approach for analysis, evaluation and control of risks. A unique leadership committee and workgroup were formed to develop processes and procedures for integrating medical devices with IT systems; as well as execution of the project itself. The leadership committee oversaw the phased approach of assessing the technology, the clinical environment, proponent technology-based solutions and a specified risk management file. The project expanded its scope beyond the standard to include a risk focussed analysis of clinical workflow to evaluate the usability of the solution. Findings – The standard focussed approach identified numerous risks associated with the technical and network solution and the future state workflow. Medical devices proved to be the most limiting technology needing to be incorporated into the solution. Although faced with a daunting list of network related risks, it was concluded that all residual risks would have been acceptable. The analysis of the future state workflow identified various risks related to usability (human factors), battery management and the absence of additional operating dollars for supplementary staffing duties and new operational expenses. Originality/value – To the best of the authors knowledge, this paper is the first one to detail the process of following the IEC80001 standard in Canada. It offers insight into building an organizational framework around the standard and identifies gaps that should be considered by executive and project sponsors before proceeding with a project.

Facilities ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (11/12) ◽  
pp. 701-715 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Jones ◽  
Api Desai ◽  
Mark Mulville ◽  
Aled Jones

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present an alternative approach to facilities and built asset management adaptation planning to climate change based on a hybrid backcasting/forecasting model. Backcasting envisions a future state and examines alternative “pathways of approach” by looking backwards from the future state to the present day. Each pathway is examined in turn to identify interventions required for that pathway to achieve the future state. Each pathway is reviewed using forecasting tools and the most appropriate is selected. This paper describes the application of this approach to the integration of climate change adaptation plans into facilities and built asset management. Design/methodology/approach – The researchers worked with various stakeholders as part of a participatory research team to identify climate change adaptations that may be required to ensure the continued performance of a new educational building over its life cycle. The team identified 2020, 2040 and 2080 year end-goals and assessed alternative pathways of approach. The most appropriate pathways were integrated into the facilities and built asset management plan. Findings – The paper outlines a conceptual framework for formulating long term facilities and built asset management strategies to address adaptation to climate change. Research limitations/implications – The conceptual framework is validated by a single research case study, and further examples are needed to ensure validity of the approach in different facilities management contexts. Originality/value – This is the first paper to explore backcasting principles as part of facilities and built asset management planning.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmed Abideen ◽  
Fazeeda Binti Mohamad

Purpose Lean implementation is vastly incorporated in core manufacturing processes; however, its applicability in the supply chain and service industry is still in its infancy. To acquire performance excellence and thrive in the global competitive market, many firms are adopting newer methodologies. But, there is a stringent need for production simulation systems to analyze supply chains both inbound and outbound. The era of face validation is slowly disappearing. Lean tools and procedures that provide future state assumptions need advanced tools and techniques to measure, quantify, analyze and validate them. The purpose of this study is to enable dynamic quantification and visualization of the future state of a warehouse supply chain value stream map using discrete event simulation (DES) technique. Design/methodology/approach This study aimed to apply an integrated approach of the value stream mapping (VSM) and DES in a Malaysian pharmaceutical production warehouse. The main focus is diverted towards reducing the warehouse supply chain lead time by initially constructing a supply chain value stream map (both present state and future state) and integrating its data in a DES modelling and simulation software to dynamically visualize the changes in future state value stream map. Findings The DES simulation was able to mimic the future state lead time reductions successfully, which assists in better decision-making. Improvements were seen related to total lead time, process time, value and non-value-added percentage. Warehouse performance metrics such as receiving, put away and storage rates were substantially improved along with pallet processing time, worker and forklift throughput usage percentage. Detailed findings are clearly stated at the end of this paper. Research limitations/implications This study is limited to the warehouse environment and further additional process models and functional upgrades in the DES software systems are very much needed to directly visualize and quantify all the possible Lean assumptions such as radio frequency image identification/Andon (Jidoka), 5S, Kanban, Just-In-Time and Heijunka. However, DES has a leading edge in extracting dynamic characteristics out of a static VSM timeline and capture details on discrete events precisely by picturizing facility modification and lead time related to it. Practical implications This paper includes all the fundamental pharmaceutical warehouse supply chain processes and the simulations of the future state VSM in a real-life context by successfully reducing supply chain lead time and allowing managers in inculcating near-optimal decision-making, controlling and coordinating warehouse supply chain activities as a whole. Social implications This integrated approach of DES and VSM can involve managers and top management to support the adoption of anticipated changes. This study also has the potential to engage practitioners, researchers and decision-makers in the warehouse industry. Originality/value This study involves a powerful DES software package that can mimic the real situation as a virtual simulation and all the data and model building are based on a real warehouse scenario in the pharmaceutical industry.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-40
Author(s):  
David Loska ◽  
James Higa

Purpose The future retirement of US Air Force (USAF) legacy weapon systems (WSs) removes their associated funding from within the Air Force Working Capital Fund and their parts from its organic supply chain inventory. The trending outsourcing of product support to contracted logistics support and its potential long-term consequences to the USAF government-owned, government-operated, organic supply chain and the reconstitution capabilities it enables in the USAF’s organic industrial base, suggests the need to assess its risks. Although there is an existing body of research into the risks of outsourcing the USAF’s industrial repair, and federal legislation such as Core 50/50 laws enacted to institutionalize its risk management, there is comparatively little research into the outsourcing risks to the long-term viability of the supply chain on which that repair capability is dependent. The aim of this research is to fill that research gap by assessing and modeling those risks. This research concludes by providing several future research directions that may be evaluated to provide more detail. Design/methodology/approach Leveraging a conceptual model derived from research and a multi-criteria analysis framework to assess supply chain risk. Quantifying the predicted impact of retirements on funding and inventories of unique parts. Modeling the potential risk due to WS retirement. Findings Results indicated long term enterprise risks to the Air Force’s supply chain correlated to the retirement of WSs and their associated funding and spare parts inventory. Originality/value This research provides an in-depth evaluation of the USAF’s supply chain to assess the holistic risk of product support outsourcing and its long-term impacts on viability by using resource-based view and contingency theory as theoretical underpinnings. In addition, insights and implications for defense supply chain managers and decision-makers.


2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandon Ow Yong ◽  
Jill Manthorpe

Purpose – Little is known about migrant Indian care workers working in long-term care facilities for people with dementia in England and the purpose of this paper is to remedy this lack of information in the light of political interest in immigration to the UK and continued staff shortages in parts of the social care sector. Design/methodology/approach – This pilot study investigated the experiences of workplace acculturation among 12 migrant Indian care workers who were employed in English care homes. Qualitative face-to-face interviews were conducted in 2013. Analysis of the interviews was conducted using principles of interpretative phenomenological analysis. Findings – Following analysis five themes emerged along an acculturation timeline. First, during the first six months of their employment, the migrant care workers recalled feeling vulnerable, seemingly marked by a sense of insecurity and an overwhelming state of cognitive burden within an unfamiliar cultural context. Second, simultaneously, the migrants felt perturbed about their new role as direct care workers. Third, few had been able to draw on their networks of friends and relatives to build up knowledge of their new work environments before starting care home employment. Fourth, two years into the work, although they reported feeling better adapted, psychological and socio-cultural adjustments were still thought to be needed. Fifth, most participants retained their ambition to be recognised as a qualified nurse in the UK and to pursue a nursing career outside the social care sector. Research limitations/implications – This is a pilot study in which 12 migrant Indian care home workers were interviewed. Further interviews might provide a greater range of views and experiences. The care homes that participated in this research were in the London region where staff shortages are common in dementia services such as care homes. Practical implications – The findings suggest a need for employers and human resource managers to respond to the specific needs of Indian and other migrants working with older people who are resident in care homes. Such responses should reflect the timeline of their acculturation and employers need also to acknowledge and address aspirations to move on to NHS work. Originality/value – This study is unique to the best of the authors’ knowledge in addressing Indian care workers specifically as a substantial part of the migrant care workforce in the UK. It offers information about their perceptions and suggests practical human response and managerial initiatives.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-54
Author(s):  
Jan Emblemsvåg

Purpose Industries lament the current situation of approaches that have resulted in huge losses in the face of complex risks. The purpose of this study is therefore to review complexity theory in the context of risk management so that it is possible to research better approaches for managing complex risks. Design/methodology/approach The approach is to review complexity theory and highlight those aspects of complexity theory that have relevance for risk management. Then, the paper ends with a discussion on what direction of research that will be most promising for the aforementioned purpose. Findings The paper finds that the most challenging aspect is to identify the weak signals, and this implies that the current approaches of estimating probabilities are not going to produce the desired results. Big data may hold a solution in the future, but with legislation such as the General Data Protection Regulation, this seems impossible to implement on ethical grounds. Hence, the most prudent approach is to use a margin of safety as advocated by Graham roughly 70 years ago. Indeed, the approach may be to assume that a disaster will take place and use risk management tools to estimate the impact for a given object. Research limitations/implications The literature review is a summary of a much larger work, and in so doing, the resulting simplification may run the risk of missing out on important details. However, with this risk in mind, the review holds rich enough discussion on complexity to be relevant for research about complex risk management. Practical implications The current implication for practice is that the paper strongly supports the notion of using a margin of safety as advocated by Graham and his most famous disciple Warren Buffet. This comes from the fact that because context is king, risk management approaches must be applied in their right domain. There is no one right way. In the future, the goal is to develop a quantitative approach that can help the industry in pricing complex risks. Originality/value The main contribution of the paper is to bring complexity theory more into the domain of risk management with sufficient details that should allow researchers to get conceptual ideas about what might work or not concerning complex risk management. If nothing else, it would be a significant contribution of the paper if it could help increasing the interest in complexity theory.


2014 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Bogue

Purpose – This paper aims to provide an introduction to smart materials, with an emphasis on their capabilities and applications. Design/methodology/approach – Following an introduction, this paper first considers what smart materials are and what they can do. It then discusses existing and emerging applications of shape changing, self-actuating, self-healing, self-diagnostic and self-sensing materials. Findings – Although difficult to define unambiguously, smart materials offer a range of unique characteristics and have been used in a multitude of products, ranging from household goods and novelty items to automotive components and medical devices. They are the topic of extensive research and all manner of new applications will emerge in the future, reflecting both technological developments and a growing awareness of their capabilities. Originality/value – This paper provides an insight into the rapidly developing technology and applications of smart materials.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Guilherme Tortorella ◽  
Guillermo Moliner Farjas ◽  
Wen Li

PurposeThe main objective of the research is to propose a method to assess the reliability of hospitals' internal logistics distribution.Design/methodology/approachA structured methodology was defined in five stages: (1) data collection and current state mapping; (2) future state design; (3) identification of the uncertainties and sources of variation; (4) reliability analysis of the proposed future state and (5) identification and prioritization of improvements.FindingsResults show shortcomings of the future state design and propose solutions to obtain a state that is more realistic and possible to perform. Subsequently, the feasibility of these improvements was analysed in order to be implemented in a real context, searching and identifying different uncertainty sources occurring inside the system.Originality/valueStudies that have addressed hospital's internal logistics are scarce. Such gap highlights the need for this research developments that address the reliability enhancement in hospitals internal logistics.


CFA Magazine ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-7
Author(s):  
Ed McCarthy
Keyword(s):  

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-122
Author(s):  
Michal Plaček ◽  
Milan Půček ◽  
František Ochrana ◽  
Milan Křápek ◽  
Ondřej H. Matyáš

This paper deals with the analysis of risks which threaten the future sustainability and operations of agricultural museums in the Czech Republic. In the section on methodology, an applicable risk model has been proposed regarding the condition of museums in the Czech Republic. Using this model, the directors of agricultural museums can assess the most significant risks which may jeopardize the sustainability of museum operations over a three-year period. The greatest risks, according to museum directors, are a lack money for investment, the inability to retain high-quality staff, and issues with technical support for exhibitions. Assessing the importance of risk is positively associated with previous experiences of a particular type of risk, whereas the association of the importance of risk with previous managerial practice is rather inconclusive.


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