Workers Involvement – A Case Study from Air Catering

Doing the right thing and doing things right is the every company’s goals. Productivity is always the number one reason to reduce production expenses and gain the most profit margins.

However, sometimes the Company forgets to look at employee involvement to support company to reach its stated goals. Company may use the best system and technology yet to leave the employee involvement behind will make a big waste as the employees are the entity that runs the system.

In what areas employees should be involved? What kind of methods to grab employee attention to support the Company through their involvement? Who will take the benefits from employee involvement?

This article will try to address those question based on a catering company named Air Catering as a case study to assess.

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Open Source Software / Free Software vs. Microsoft: How cheap can you go?

The new revolution of software implementation has begun. After some decades when the world was offered by proprietary software produced by Microsoft, nowadays another approach is coming and unstoppable. This new revolution offers shareable software source code and available freely from the Internet. It means that user can now has a freedom to update and distribute the software as the freely as possible.

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Network Health Checklist

  • No shared Ethernet segments are saturated (no more than 40 percent network utilization).
  • No shared Token Ring segments are saturated (no more than 70 percent network utilization).
  • No WAN links are saturated (no more than 70 percent network utilization).
  • The response time is generally less than 100 milliseconds.
  • No segments have more than 20 percent broadcast/multicast.
  • No segments have more than one cyclic redundancy check (CRC) error per million bytes of data.
  • On the Ethernet segments, less than 0.1 percent of the packets result in collisions.
  • On the Token Ring segments, less than 0.1 percent of the packets are soft errors that are unrelated to ring insertion.
  • On the Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) segments, there has been no more than one ring operation per hour that is not related to ring insertion.
  • The Cisco routers are not over-utilized (5-minute CPU utilization is no more than 75 percent).
  • The number of output queue drops has not exceeded 100 in an hour on any Cisco router.
  • The number of input queue drops has not exceeded 50 in an hour on any Cisco router.
  • The number of buffer misses has not exceeded 25 in an hour on any Cisco router.
  • The number of ignored packets has not exceeded 10 in an hour on any interface on a Cisco router.

Source: CCDA Self-Study: Designing for Cisco Internetwork Solutions (DESGN), ISBN:1-58705-141-9

How Should Lego Protect Its Trademark, Operating System, and Applications?

Lego Company (’Company’) is a toy company based on Denmark (McNurlin, BC & Sprague, RH 2004). As one of the biggest toy company in the world, Lego, in year 1998, launch a new toy game called Mindstorm which is actually a lego toy with capability to run several commands from a computer, and it is programmable (McNurlin, BC & Sprague, RH 2004). Suddenly, the target of 12,000 toys sale became oversold into 100,000 units with 70 percent customers were ’old enough to vote’ (Keegan 2001).

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Australia Post: Hoping a better service.

I did my medical check up on 22 Dec 2005, they offered me whether I wanted to use post express service to deliver the result to my home. I thought why not?

1 February 2006, I called the Clinic where I had my medical exam, they said the result already been mailed by 27 of January 2006 (Friday). It is a next-day-delivery service, I should have got it by Monday, 30 January 2006.

1 February 2006, I called the Australia Post office, they said that my post express package already scanned and received by Australia Post by 31 January 2006. It is a same-day delivery, so I should have got it by 31 January 2006. The officer said (and insisted!) that I better wait until 05.00 pm and it was already around 4 pm.

2 February 2006, I called the Australia Post office again, and they gave me a trouble-ticket number and said that somebody will call.

Today, 6 February 2006 on 03.44 pm, I called Australia Post office and they said that I have to wait another 10 working days while they are trying to find out where my package is.

They said that is the best thing they can do!