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This book covers the strategic use of continuous improvement (CI) techniques for manufacturing performance improvement. It focuses primarily on strategies that can be adopted by small and middle-sized enterprises in manufacturing in order to meet the global challenges and competition. The book begins with an introduction to CI (or Kaizen), explaining different CI approaches and strategies. Chapter 2 offers a literature review of CI, examining conceptual frameworks, case studies, and surveys. Next, the book deals with the design of the study, detailing the work done in each phase along with the tools, techniques and models. Chapter 4 presents a detailed survey to determine the present status of continuous improvement strategies in the Indian manufacturing industry, and to also assess the role of key enablers leading to improve the performance of manufacturing operations. Chapter 5 is comprised of detailed case studies to further analyze the application of the discussed CI strategies. The purpose of Chapter 6 is to develop the implementation plan based on multicriteria decision making for improving the performance of SMEs and synthesis of data using Decision making techniques and Structural Equation Modeling. Finally Chapter 7 provides conclusions, addresses potential limitations, and also looks to the future.

The study examines changes in earnings of the workers over 1 year. The results show differential impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on income of the workers. The findings suggest that workers, whose occupations were restricted in the initial phase of lockdown, continue to do worse even after lifting the restrictions. Females, casual workers and the less educated are among the worst affected by the economic shock. They continue to lag behind with no sign of catching up with other groups. The study asks for short- and long-term policy measures to address the issue.

The study examines changes in earnings of the workers over 1 year. The results show differential impact of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on income of the workers. The findings suggest that workers, whose occupations were restricted in the initial phase of lockdown, continue to do worse even after lifting the restrictions. Females, casual workers and the less educated are among the worst affected by the economic shock. They continue to lag behind with no sign of catching up with other groups. The study asks for short- and long-term policy measures to address the issue.

This article traces income and employment changes through various phases of the lockdown based on primary data. It analyses the coping strategies of people in response to fall in their income. The article reveals that there was a large drop in income and employment with the announcement of lockdown. While there is some recovery with easing of the lockdown, the income at the time of survey is still substantially lower than its pre-lockdown level. Casual labour households with the largest fall in income and employment are the most affected. Income and employment losses are also higher among Scheduled Caste (SC) and Other Backward Caste (OBC) households. In the absence of any income, the households either had to live off their savings or had to borrow money for their basic needs. With rapidly depleting savings, borrowing approached its limits, and with slow recovery of income, households may need substantial government assistance to save them from deprivation.

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Elsevier under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ; Rapidly developing technology and an increasing number of products containing electrical or electronicfunctions, has led to discarded electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) being one of the fastest growingwaste streams. The European Union (EU) has enacted several iterations of the Waste Electrical andElectronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive to address this complex waste stream. However, recycling dom-inates treatments for e-waste, despite the established 'waste hierarchy' showing waste prevention andreuse are generally preferable to recycling.This paper reports on 30 semi-structured interviews, undertaken across the EEE value chain, examiningthe impact of the WEEE Directive in the UK. The interviews confirmed that reuse takes place for a limitednumber of product types, mostly on a small scale. Additionally, whilst legislation has prompted innova-tion in recycling and higher capture rates, resource recovery is in practice limited to easily salvageablematerials, whilst recovery of critical raw materials is often neglected. Furthermore, there is confusionaround available collection networks, particularly for small WEEE, which consistently appears in residualwaste streams.The waste hierarchy remains the key component of EU waste strategy and moving to the higher levelsof the waste hierarchy is an essential part of achieving sustainable waste management and movingtowards a circular economy. The paper proposes a series of measures to this end: promoting recoveryroutes and practices that facilitate reuse of suitable products, adapting recycling technology to increaserecovery of critical raw materials and targeted policies to encourage the application of the waste hierar-chy within a resource efficiency-oriented framework.

In today's era every organization wants to implement Cloud Computing to fullfil their needs of computing.The Cloud computing is a fastest growing area in every sector like IT industry ,Government organizations etc . The Cloud computing emerges as a new computing paradigm which aims to provide computation, software, data access, and storage services that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services. The intent of this paper is to have a review on cloud computing, its working ,its use in various sectors,deployment models and services.

Cities are seen as one of the leading forces in making our societies sustainable and resource efficient. The latest trends of sharing homes, cars, bikes, tools and other goods are fast entering our urban lives. The sharing economy is a consumption-production mode in a city, in which value is generated through transactions between peers or organisations that offer access to their idling or underutilised rivalrous physical assets. These assets are made available to individuals in processes often mediated by online platforms (Mont, Voytenko Palgan, and Zvolska 2019).Examples of sharing economy organisations (SEOs) include bicycle and car sharing initiatives, tool and clothes libraries, and short-term accommodation rentals between peers. The activities of SEOs are often cited as solutions to urban sustainability challenges, but their contribution to sustainability, resource efficiency and the circular economy has not been systematically evaluated. To build up an evidence base, and support sustainable sharing, a systematic and comparative analysis of the role of cities in sharing is needed. This report presents the outcomes of a one-day mobile lab on urban sharing in Malmö, which was arranged on 7 March 2018 within the framework of the Sharing and the City project, with support from the Sharing Cities Sweden programme and the Urban Reconomy project. A mobile lab is a collaborative process of conducting in-situ analysis by a research team that allows analysis of the study object, the sharing economy, in its context. Sharing in cities becomes institutionalised through two principal sets of dynamic processes. The first is a top-down institutionalisation dynamic when a city government employs its agency to promote or inhibit certain SEOs. To do so, it undertakes one or several of the following roles: regulator, provider, enabler and self-governor. The second set of institutionalisation processes of sharing in cities is bottom-up, resulting from institutional work by SEOs. These two sets of institutionalisation processes ...

We qualitatively analysed how and why environmental improvement actions often lead to unintended environmental consequences. Different theories are integrated to delineate the underlying system structure causing this system behavior. Causal loop diagram technique is utilized to explore and visualize: how incremental improvements in material and energy efficiency can unintendedly cause consumption to increase; how this consumption rebound effect is linked to generation of waste and pollution; and how this can give rise to social and negative externalities, economic inequalities and other broad unintended consequences in our society. Consumption and incremental innovation are found to be the highest leverage points and reinforcing factors driving unintended environmental consequences in this complex system. The paper in addition explores two potential modes of behaviour dissimilar to those of unintended environmental consequences. These emerging modes of behaviour are product‐service systems and environmental policy instruments. Their combination forms a prominent transition pathway from a production‐consumption‐dispose economy to a so‐called circular economy. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

"Urban Sharing in Amsterdam" explores the landscape of the sharing economy in the city context. This research is a result of a Mobile Research Lab conducted by 7 researchers from Lund university in 2019. Specific focus is on three sectors: sharing of space, mobility and physical goods. For each sector, we discuss the drivers and barriers to the sharing economy, the associated sustainability impacts,the potential impacts on incumbent sectors, and the institutional context of sharing. Then, attention is turned to the role of the city council in engaging with the sharing economy and specific governance mechanisms employed by the city council aredescribed.Since the sharing economy is not sustainable by default, urban sharing organisations, city governments and incumbents all have important roles to play in ensuring that the sharing economy positively impacts cities and their citizens. In the face of negative perceptions and possible impacts of the sharing economy, we may need to be more deliberate in thinking in terms of scaling the sharing economy to the size, needs, and capacities of cities. Insights contained within this report may support the City of Amsterdam and other Sharing Cities, as well as urban sharing organisations and third-party actors in Amsterdam and beyond in their strategic work with the sharing economy for sustainability.