A Systematic Review on Supply Chain Management in Prefabricated House-Building Research

Prefabricated house-building companies, as suppliers or supply chains, which use manufacturing as a business approach towards industrialization, struggle to implement principles and optimal practices driven from well-established and validated theories in operational research. Supply chain management has a mature body of knowledge that has been widely adopted by research on offsite construction to improve its performance at an organisational level. However, there is no comprehensive review available in the literature for supply chain management theory within prefabricated house building research from the perspective of suppliers. In this study, a systematic review was conducted on the available literature on supply chain management within prefabricated house-building research. Initially, qualitative analysis was performed to identify the key themes. Later, quantitative analyses were applied to validate the overlapping themes and keywords. Further, key trends related to focus, methods and theories or frameworks were reported. The findings were discussed in the context of recent developments in all principal component bodies of supply chain management for future work. This study also provides a brief guide for potential future review studies to explore interdisciplinary intervention within the offsite stream.

Carving New Dimensions for Entrepreneurial Management

The purpose of this study is to identify the strategies, enabling the current and potential businesses to achieve their commercial and operational objectives. In-depth semi-structured interviews were used as data collection tools. The data were analyzed through thematic content analysis to gauge themes from the interviews. The explored strategies were mentor-mentee relationship, effective team building, research and development to sustain in the long run, continuous innovation to keep ahead of the competition, efficient customer management to retain the customer base and product proposition. Besides that, academia would be benefited in terms of inculcating such strategic frameworks in the course curriculum of entrepreneurship. The study's originality revolves around a comprehensive strategy from an Asian subcontinent to build and manage the entrepreneurial setup. The literature of entrepreneurship also highlights the importance of such strategies, enabling the practice and academia to learn and harness their business ideas.

The Spine, the New HQ for the Royal College of Physicians, Liverpool, UK

This chapter catalogues the working experiences of the architects AHR and their design team and their clients, the Royal College of Physicians, for the design and construction of The Spine, their new Northern HQ, in Liverpool, UK. This iconic building opened in early 2021 and optimistically reflects the ethos and values of the college, and it is set to become one of the healthiest buildings in the world. It will describe and explain the biophilic and salutogenic design construction processes taken by the design team, from commissioning to completion. The main objective for the college when commissioning AHR architects to design their new building was to significantly expand their facilities and to reflect their standing in the world of medicine. So, the AHR design team endeavored to help them attain their goal of a WELL Platinum and the Building Research Establishments Environmental Assessment Methods (BREEAM) Outstanding certification.

Comparison between the British and American Methods in Designing Concrete using Local Aggregate in the City of Mosul Preparation

This research included an applied study for the design of concrete mixtures by following the method of the American Concrete Institute (ACl) and the method of the Building Research Center in England (British method) to restriction which of these two methods is more suitable for use and application in the design of concrete mixtures when using local aggregate (gravel and sand taken from the area Badush and Aski Mosul), where job mixes were made using the mixing ratios obtained from these two methods, and a comparative study was made for the properties concrete resulting in the soft state (workability )and the hardened state (compressive resistance), and the results proved the following: A- In general, when discussing the results according to mixing ratios and workability levels, the method of the Building Research Center in England (the British method) gave higher results than the results obtained by the American Concrete Institute method (the American method) when using the above local aggregate whereas results shown increase in (workability) and Compressive strength. This increase amounts to the percentages shown in the table below: Compressive strength (%) Slump test (%) workability 10.48 14.40 Precipitation = 10-8 cm 12.10 21.40 Precipitation = 18-15 cm Table (1-1) B- It is possible to make another comparison, when fixing the proportion of water/cement, it turns out that the method of the Building Research Center in England (the British method) gives higher workability than the method of the American Concrete Institute (the American method) and for the same proportion of cement/ water, the American method gives Higher compressive strength than the British method. C- The building research center method is a more practical and applicable method more than the American Concrete Institute method because it takes the type of cement, the type of aggregate and other properties of the aggregate (especially particle shape) into consideration

Book review: Pankaj Jalote (Ed.), Building Research Universities in India

Pankaj Jalote (Ed.), Building Research Universities in India (SAGE Studies in Higher Education). SAGE Publications, 2021, 415 pp., ₹1495, ISBN: 9789353885021 (Hardback).

Building Support for Practice Research

This chapter was designed to provide readers a broad understanding of factors that should be considered when attempting to implement research in a practice environment. Common obstacles to conducting research in practice settings are discussed in this chapter and include administrative factors, work demands placed on practitioners, the availability of research knowledge and skills, and the research tradition of some professions. To address these, recommendations have been developed to remediate these barriers. These involve building support and demand for practice research by increasing its value to stakeholders, the development of and/or accessibility to research skills, and providing the infrastructure necessary to conduct practice research. The importance of including practitioners in the process of building research capacity is discussed. In order to increase the chances of success, capacity building must be collaborative. All activities should include representation from all employee groups that will either participate in the research process or be consumers of research.

Introduction

Single-subject research has historically had an important position in the areas of research and practice evaluation. With the current trend toward evidence-based practice, the emphasis in this chapter is on the demand for and reliance on this practice-based, evidence-building research design to increase in the future. SSD for R is a software package available to help researchers and practitioners analyze single-subject research data. This chapter describes the historical, current, and future uses of single-subject research and the contributions of these designs to both visual and statistical analysis. A brief review of software packages to handle this type of analysis is included in this chapter. Finally, an overview of the functionality of SSD for R is provided.

Meta-Analysis in Single-Subject Evaluation Research

Meta-analytic techniques can be used to aggregate evaluation results across studies. In the case of single-subject research designs, we could combine findings from evaluations with 5, 10 or 20 clients to determine, on average, how effective an intervention is. This is a more complex and sophisticated way of understanding differences across studies than reporting those changes qualitatively or simply reporting the individual effect sizes for each study. In this chapter, the authors discuss why meta-analysis is important to consider in single-subject research, particularly in the context of building research evidence. They then demonstrate how to do this using SSD for R functions. Building upon effect sizes, introduced in Chapter 4, the authors illustrate the conditions under which it is appropriate to use traditional effect sizes to conduct meta-analyses, how to introduce intervening variables, and how to evaluate statistical output. Additionally, the authors discuss and illustrate the computation and interpretation of a mean Non-Overlap of All Pairs in situations which traditional effect sizes cannot be used.