Bending Metal: Improving Sheet Metal Repair at Tobyhanna Army Depot through Lean Six Sigma

The Army's Lean Six Sigma methodology includes five phases: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control (DMAIC); each of these phases includes interaction between the stakeholder and process team. This paper focuses on the application of Lean Six Sigma methodology at Tobyhanna Army Depot to help reduce overruns and repair cycle time within the sheet metal cost center. At the initiation of the project, the process incurred over 4,000 hours of overruns, a situation in which it takes longer to repair an asset than the standard hours allocated for the repair. Additionally, the average repair cycle time, amount of time required to repair an individual asset, exceeded customer expectations by almost four days. The paper describes recommended solutions to address both problems.

Wealth Inequality, Network Topology and Financial Instability

This paper asks if two, otherwise identical, economies were distinguished only by their distributions of wealth, are they equally stable in response to a random shock? A theoretical financial network model is proposed to understand the relationship between wealth inequality and financial crises. In a financial network, financial assets link individual asset and liability holders to form a web of economic connections. The total connectivity of an individual is described by their degree, and the overall distribution of connections in the network is imposed through a degree distribution--equivalent to the wealth distribution as incoming connections represent assets and outgoing connections liabilities. A network's topology varies with the level of wealth inequality and total wealth and together, simulations show, they determine network contagion in the event of a random negative income shock to some individual. Random network simulations, whereby each financial connection is randomly placed, reveal that increasing wealth inequality makes a wealthy network less stable--as measured by the share of individuals failing financially or the decline in financial asset values. These results suggest a unique architectural role for accumulated assets and their distribution in macro-financial stability.

Modeling and transportation planning for US noncombatant evacuation operations in South Korea

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate US noncombatant evacuation operations (NEO) in South Korea and devise planning and management procedures that improve the efficiency of those missions. Design/methodology/approach: It formulates a time-staged network model of the South Korean noncombatant evacuation system as a mixed integer linear program to determine an optimal flow configuration that minimizes the time required to complete an evacuation. This solution considers the capacity and resource constraints of multiple transportation modes and effectively allocates the limited assets across a time-staged network to create a feasible evacuation plan. That solution is post-processed and a vehicle routing procedure then produces a high resolution schedule for each individual asset throughout the entire duration of the NEO. Findings: This work makes a clear improvement in the decision-making and resource allocation methodology currently used in a NEO on the Korea peninsula. It immediately provides previously unidentifiable information regarding the scope and requirements of a particular evacuation scenario and then produces an executable schedule for assets to facilitate mission accomplishment. Originality/value: The significance of this work is not relegated only to evacuation operations on the Korean peninsula; there are numerous other NEO and natural disaster related scenarios that can benefit from this approach.

Application of Long Endurance UAS for Top-Down Methane Emission Measurements of Oil and Gas Facilities in an Offshore Environment

Oil & gas (O&G) operators are increasingly focused on decarbonization and reaching net-zero carbon emissions. The O&G industry seeks to minimise methane emissions. Verification of estimated emissions using top down measurement methods represents a critical component of this effort. A novel approach to operationalizing top-down emissions surveys was developed and demonstrated, leveraging expertise in unmanned vehicle application, innovative methane emissions measurement technology, and an O&G industry collaborator. The inspection technique utilizes a fixed-wing unmanned aircraft to perform a remote offshore asset inspection while safely launching and recovering onshore. This method enables the collection of many tens of thousands individual point methane concentration measurements and affords the ability to resolve facility-level methane emissions and in conjunction with appropriate environmental conditions information, derive an accurate emission rate for an individual asset, while accounting for background fluctuation and potential upwind sources.The unmanned aircraft does not require any crew or equipment to be taken offshore or make modifications to the asset, thus allowing inspections to be performed with minimum impact to facility operations. This work overcame significant regulatory hurdles to fly long distance unmanned aircraft in congested airspace, developed detailed operational procedures and demonstrated the safety of the technique to both the O&G and aviation community, and the effectiveness of the measurement technology. The work demonstrated the suitability of the technique for operationalisation for routine measurement programmes.

The Total Return and Risk to Residential Real Estate

We estimate total returns to rental housing by studying over 170,000 hand-collected archival observations of prices and rents for individual houses in Paris (1809–1943) and Amsterdam (1900–1979). The annualized real total return, net of costs and taxes, is 4.0% for Paris and 4.8% for Amsterdam and entirely comes from rental yields. Our returns weakly correlate with the implied returns in Jorda et al. (2019) and are substantially lower. We decompose total return risk at the individual asset level and find that yield risk becomes an increasingly important component of property-level risk for longer investment horizons.

Exploring Network Measures of Social Capital: Toward More Relational Measurement

Although social capital is a relational concept, existing studies have focused less on measuring social relations. This article fills the gap by reviewing recent studies that used network measures grouped into three types according to the measurement level. The first group defined social capital as an individual asset and used node-level measures to explain personal benefits. The second group defined social capital as a collective asset and used graph-level measures to describe collective properties. The third group used subgraph-level measures to explain the development of social capital. This article offers a link between the concepts and measures of social capital.

Meaning making and resilience among academically high-achieving Roma women

This paper investigates the self-narratives of academically high-achieving, first generation college educated, and highly resilient Roma women. We place their meaning making and social navigation processes at the centre of our inquiry, understanding it as an important element of the resilience process of upward mobility (Ungar 2012). Self-narratives describing their changing social class and the corresponding dilemmas offers us the opportunity to understand their strategies, and how to accomplish a resilient minority mobility trajectory, by mitigating the tension and the emotional cost that unavoidably comes with the large social distance they travel between their community of origin and the newly attained class (Naudet 2018). The article draws on two research projects; the first conducted in Spain (2015-17) among 35 Roma university graduates, and the second in Hungary, (2018-20), between 150 Roma and non-Roma university graduates. We have selected one ‘resilient minority mobility trajectory’ as an ideal type from each database for the purposes of this comparison. In this category, upwardly mobile Roma graduates achieve their aspired self- development with the minimal ‘emotional cost’ possible. Our main argument is that a ‘minority path of social ascension’, in itself, is not enough to mitigate the high emotional costs of changing social class. It also requires negotiation, meaning making or reframing work. In this thesis, we support Michael Ungar’s proposal that resilience during upward mobility is a process in one’s ecological context and not an individual asset, and that meaning making work is a crucial part of it. We expand this thesis, however, by demonstrating how navigation among the available resources, and the negotiation of what a ‘proper Roma woman’ and a ‘successful life’ means, in the community of origin, plays a crucial part in accomplishing a resilient upward mobility process.

Speaking Acquaintances or Helpers in Need: Participation in Civic Associations and Individual Social Capital

It is widely believed that civic associations are capable to produce social capital, here understood as an individual asset resulting from relations of mutual support and assistance. Although hardly anybody denies that socializing is widespread in many civic associations, it still remains to be shown that this socializing provides a genuine commitment to support. This paper explores the relationship between involvement in civic organizations and social support. The data analysed come from a nation-wide survey “Organized Sport and Social Capital—Revisited” (OSSCAR) representing the adult population in Germany. Findings show that participation in civic associations is associated with higher levels of social support. This effect is stronger for active participants and weaker for passive members. Path analyses further indicate that this effect is mediated by a person’s sociability orientations as well as her commitment to prosocial values. These findings help providing a more nuanced understanding of mechanisms of social capital formation in civic associations.

Testing risk proxies for financial collateral haircuts: adequacy of capturing tail risk

Purpose The use of risk proxies in internal models remains a popular modelling solution. However, there is some risk that a proxy may not constitute an adequate representation of the underlying asset in terms of capturing tail risk. Therefore, using empirical examples for the financial collateral haircut model, this paper aims to critically review available statistical tools for measuring the adequacy of capturing tail risk by proxies used in the internal risk models of banks. In doing so, this paper advises on the most appropriate solutions for validating risk proxies. Design/methodology/approach This paper reviews statistical tools used to validate if the equity index/fund benchmark are proxies that adequately represent tail risk in the returns on an individual asset (equity/fund). The following statistical tools for comparing return distributions of the proxies and the portfolio items are discussed: the two-sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, the spillover test and the Harrell’s C test. Findings Upon the empirical review of the available statistical tools, this paper suggests using the two-sample Kolmogorov–Smirnov test to validate the adequacy of capturing tail risk by the assigned proxy and the Harrell’s C test to capture the discriminatory power of the proxy-based collateral haircuts models. This paper also suggests a tool that compares the reactions of risk proxies to tail events to verify possible underestimation of risk in times of significant stress. Originality/value The current regulations require banks to prove that the modelled proxies are representative of the real price observations without underestimation of tail risk and asset price volatility. This paper shows how to validate proxy-based financial collateral haircuts models.

An Analysis of Green Human Resource Management

The goal of this survey is to investigate green human asset the executive’s practices of associations dependent on the present literature. In this rapid developing field, it is commonly seen that the present writing must be expanded extra from the point of view of elements of individual asset the executives it uncovers that a great part of the olden times analysis concentrated on couple of elements of Human Resource Management, for example, enlistment, preparing and advancement, execution assessment and reward the board in incorporating ecological administration with Human Resource Management however Human Resource Management has progressively probable and degree in increasing association’s natural execution. Henceforth this audit consolidates various elements of HRM to explore the separate green human resource management rehearses under the 12 elements of HRM, for example, Work configuration, Work examination, Human asset arranging, Enrollment choice, Acceptance, Execution assessment preparing and improvement, Remunerate the executives, Discipline the executives, wellbeing and security the board and representative associations. The commitment of this analysis lies in expanding the extension and perceptiveness of green human resource management in emerging economic condition execution of association.