Agile practices

Agile drivers and practices addressing the drivers of agile supply chains, and the use of agile practices to support them. 

Key issue How can we use agile practices to benefit from turbulence in the marketplace ... 

The next section offers case examples of companies that have navigated the minefield of some of the toughest agile practice areas which are viewed as being of greatest importance by survey respondents. 

What are the agile practices that help to underpin the agile supply chain ... 

For the practicing chemist, a working knowledge of present-day chemical nomenclature is indispensable. However, most chemists have neither the time nor the inclination to acquire the detailed knowledge of nomenclature rules that is essential for their correct application. To derive a unique systematic name for a complex chemical structure is an exercise requiring some intellectual agility the rules to be applied are often highly involved, and their correct interpretation is not always apparent. 

There are several flavors of the agile iterative process. The most popular ones are the Rational Unified Process (RUP) (Kruchten, 2003) and Extreme Programming (XP) (Beck, 2004). Other flavors include Scrum (Schwaber and Beedle, 2001), Evo, and Feature-Driven Development (Palmer and Felsing, 2002). The following list of key practices is found in all agile iterative development processes that in my view are the most important. For details, please refer to Larman (2004) and Beck (2004). 

Larman, C. 2005. Applying UML and Patterns An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development, Third Edition. Prentice Hall. Martin, R. 2003. Agile Software Development Principles, Patterns, and Practices. Prentice Hall. 

Huber L. A Primer. Good Laboratory Practice and Current Good Manufacturing Practice. Waldbronn, Germany Agilent Technologies, 2000 116. 

In practice, many difficulties of routine DFAA analysis in open ocean waters stem from the extremely low concentrations present. Great care must be taken to avoid contamination and to monitor procedural blanks. Assuming no special chromatographic problems exist, detection limits can also be affected by the sensitively of the florescence detector used. Simply replacing an old lamp may help substan-tiaUy, and new generations of florescence detectors (e.g., offered by Shimadzu, Agilent, Varian, etc.) claim substantial improvement in power and optics. It is also possible to use column pre-concentration to increase sensitivity (Lee and Bada, 1975). This approach could be extremely useful for investigation of minor DFAA components, such as D-enantiomers of DFAA (Lee and Bada, 1975, 1977). However, because most of the common DFAA components can be measured directly, pre-concentration approaches have not been widely used. 

S. W. Ambler, Agile Modeling Effective Practices for eXtreme Programming and the Unified Process. Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, 2002. 

While companies attempted to implement best practices over the last 30 years, they are now grappling with the fact that many Y2K projects built an efficient supply chain without resiliency. These investments made the supply chain strong, but not agile. Today, most companies have processes that can respond, but cannot adapt. They are too rigid. They cannot sense and adapt to market shifts. This is the basis of the drive to create market-driven value networks. 

Does the employer use a particular employment practice that has a disparate impact on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin For example, if an employer requires that all applicants pass a physical agility test, does the test disproportionately screen out women Determining whether a test or other selection procedure has a disparate impact on a particular group ordinarily requires a statistical analysis. 

Ismail and Sharifi (2006) present a structured framework to provide a practical approach for implementing agile supply chains (ASC), based on the concepts of supply chain design and design for supply chain. 

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