The supply chains (SCs) have to appeal to new management paradigms to improve their ability to respond rapidly and cost effectively to unpredictable changes in markets and increasing levels of environmental turbulence, both in terms of volume and variety. In this highly demanded context, the Agile paradigm provides the capabilities to SC quickly adapt to changes in the market requirements. The purpose of this paper is to suggest an Agile Index to assess the agility of the automotive companies and corresponding SCs.The proposed integrated assessment model incorporates Agile practices weighted according to their importance to the automotive SC competitiveness and obtained from the Delphi technique.

n/a

Saturation Transfer Difference-NMR (STD-NMR) spectroscopy has emerged as a powerful screening tool and a straightforward way to study the binding epitopes of active compounds in early stage lead discovery in pharmaceutical research. Here we report the application of STD NMR to characterize the binding of the anti-inflammatory drugs ibuprofen, diclofenac and ketorolac to COX-1 and COX-2. Using well-studied COX inhibitors and by comparing STD signals with crystallographic structures we show that there is a relation between the orientations of ibuprofen and diclofenac in the COX-2 active site and the relative STD responses detected in the NMR experiments. Based on this analysis we propose that ketorolac should bind to the COX-2 active site in similar orientation as that of diclofenac. We also show that the combination of STD NMR with competition experiments constitutes a valuable tool to address the recently proposed behavior of COX-2 as functional heterodimers and complement enzyme activity studies in the effort to rationalize COX inhibition mechanisms.

Summary: We consider various classes of monoids of transformations on a finite chain, in particular of transformations that preserve or reverse either the order or the orientation. Being finite monoids we are naturally interested in computing both their cardinals and their idempotent numbers. Fibonacci and Lucas numbers play an essential role in the last computations.

n/a

n/a