Commerce Enters Level

Unilever pic, the consumer products giant with such brands as Dove soap, Close-Up toothpaste, Q-tips, and Helene Curtis hair products, introduced such a Level 3 system when it linked subsidiary companies with contract manufacturers. Unilever places orders electronically and the contractors use the Unilever extranet to update order status, make changes, expedite orders, and review shipments. Status reports are fed into Unilever s internal warehouse management and logistics systems in real time so Unilever can quickly coordinate the delivery of goods to retailers (Semilof, 2001, p. 1). This system replaces a legacy system that entered orders piecemeal via the phone, e-mail, and fax, and where all transactions had to be entered manually into the firm s supply chain management applications. 

Profit Analyzer looks at all the costs and revenues that go into making an order profitable and allows the firm to conduct what-if scenarios to determine how pricing structures will affect the company s bottom line. Drop Swap recommends where to swap a driver mid-trip if there will be problems for the driver getting home or for an on-time delivery (Hickey, 2001, p. 21). 

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Absorption Across the Skin. An aqueous carrier may be used for a variety of dermal products. In fact, carriers can be designed to limit the transportation of the penetration of the active ingredient (such as an insect repellent), if the desired effect is to keep the activity on the surface of the skin. Once again, however, only those materials that are dissolved will be available for penetration across the skin to gain access to the systemic circulation. For almost all chemicals in or about to enter commerce, dermal penetration is a passive process. The relative thickness of the skin makes absorption (into the systemic circulation) slower than the absorption across the GI or pulmonary barriers. This is compounded by the fact that the stratum comeum ftmction is to be impervious to the environment. One of the skin s major functions is protection from infection. Once a chemical penetrates into the dermis, it may partition into the subcutaneous fat. Essentially, absorption across the skin is a two-step process with the first being penetration and deposition into the skin and the second being release from the skin into the systemic circulation. The pattern of blood levels obtained via dermal penetration is generally one with a delayed... 

This chapter provides the connection between the annual and cumulative U.S. and global lead production and consumption figures presented in Chapter 3 and figures in the next two chapters, those for fate and transport of emitted lead through environmental compartments (Chapter 5) and levels of lead in environmental media relevant to human lead exposures (Chapter 6). These three chapters collectively provide a quantitative sense of what amounts of lead entering the broad channels of the U.S. and global commerce have been translated downstream of production or use into levels of lead contamination in the human environment and associated exposures in, at least, the near term. 

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