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Economic, demographic, social, technological and political changes worldwide are putting academic institutions under intense pressures. In response, universities are adopting new managerial approaches to their activities: lean, six sigma and lean six sigma. A portrait of this experience emerges from reviewing the literature published over the past decade using the databases Compendex & INSPEC/Engineering Village and Scopus. These approaches have been applied primarily on a highly localized basis to teaching-related processes or to services such as financing, data processing and building maintenance. Some of the challenges raised are not unknown outside of the university setting. The complexity of universities, the difficulties of interpreting notions such as the client, added value, and the connexions between teaching and research, make the implementation of these approaches difficult. While the few measured results available suggest that they do hold promise, their impact remains to be determined.

Despite undeniable progress, the mining industry remains the scene of serious accidents revealing disregard for occupational health and safety (OHS) and leaving open the debate regarding the safety of its employees. The San José mine last collapse near Copiapó, Chile on 5 August 2010 and the 69-day rescue operation that followed in order to save 33 miners trapped underground show the serious consequences of neglecting worker health and safety. The aim of this study was to validate a new approach to integrating OHS into risk management in the context of a new open-pit mining project in Quebec, based on analysis of incident and accident reports, semi-structured interviews, questionnaires and collaborative field observations. We propose a new concept, called hazard concentration, based on the number of hazards and their influence. This concept represents the weighted fraction of each category of hazards related to an undesirable event. The weight of each category of hazards is calculated by AHP, a multicriteria method. The proposed approach included the creation of an OHS database for facilitating expert risk management. Reinforcing effects between hazard categories were identified and all potential risks were prioritized. The results provided the company with a rational basis for choosing a suitable accident prevention strategy for its operational activities.

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Due to the current economic situation and the growth in world demand, the mining industry is undergoing a period of spectacular development. The current need to increase production at mine sites coincides with the development of managerial capacities, the use of new industrial methods and equipment, and increased use of skilled workforce. Despite such developments, a number of researchers view the mining sector among the world's most uncertain and hazardous industries. Although the sector utilizes risk management tools appropriately, several large-scale mining projects have failed as a result of neglect or underestimation of hazards. Total risk management of a new project remains a goal to be attained so as to enhance reliability of decisions and make mining organizations safer and more secure. The intent of this paper is to provide researchers and practitioners a preliminary portrait of the risks related to new mining projects. To attain this objective, the authors have primarily used results from research undertaken in the f eld. They completed this portrait using the results of hazard identif cation studies that they conducted in an open-pit mining project in Quebec. During this study, a number of data-gathering techniques were used, including documentation analysis, collaborative f eld observations, and interviews with managers and workers. This work demonstrates the possibility of identifying a number of categories of known risks and uncertainties not recently taken into account in any systemic or systematic way in mining project risk management. In this paper, identif ed risks are categorized hierarchically to show the impact and possibility of occurrence of each for every project phase. Despite having a number of limitations, this study enables construction of a risks portrait indispensable for completing a reliable and rapid assessment of mining project hazards.

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This article extends previous work on co-optimization of production and corrective and preventive maintenance including lockout/tagout. We study the impact of human error on repairable manufacturing systems subject to random failure over an infinite planning horizon and its implications for system capacity and inventory policies, and we derive an optimal policy for minimizing production cost based on machinery maintenance and inventory management while meeting market demand over an infinite horizon. A numerical example is provided to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach and a sensitivity analysis is presented to confirm the efficiency of the control policy.