Something happened to Robbie Doyle on the way to medical school. He decided to take a six-month break after graduating from Harvard to work at Hood Sailmakers in Marblehead, Massachusetts. He never looked back. The intuitive grasp of the forces of wind and water that made Doyle a natural dinghy sailor as a youth and, years later, an applied physics major in college turned out to be invaluable assets in designing fast, light and powerful sails.

Lapland might be more commonly associated with Santa Claus than mining for gold, but this is where one of the largest gold deposits in northern Europe is to be found. Known reserves at the Kittilä Mine already contain more than four million ounces and there is a strong probability that much more will yet be found in a series of deposits running along a 25 kilometre trend. The mine is located approximately 900 kilometres north of Helsinki and 150 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle.

The merger will create a major Canadian-American player in the world of specialty pharmaceutical companies. Retaining the Valeant name, it will focus on four areas, including treatments for the skin and for neurology, and is expected to realize more than $175 million in cost savings by the second year.

Inspectorate ranks among the global leaders in commodities testing and inspection, a market which covers a wide range of inspection and laboratory testing services for oil and petrochemical products, metals and minerals, and agricultural products.

Founded in 1885 and headquartered in Witham, UK, the company operates from 150 laboratories in 60 countries, employing over 7,000 people.

One of the most significant contributors to an organisation’s energy consumption is IT, and the data centre in particular. The Carbon Reduction Commitment (or CRC Energy Scheme) has made it more important than ever that data centres are built to a high specification for maximum energy efficiency. The UK’s first mandatory carbon trading scheme, it affects around 5,000 organisations, and is compulsory for large organisations using more than 6,000 MWh/year of half-hourly metered electricity—or around £500,000 in electricity bills.

One of the greatest impacts on a best-in-class retail S&OP process is consistent with our observations of impacts on a best-in-class manufacturing S&OP process, and that is the elimination of “organizational silos” and the transparency of information visibility. S&OP is truly working and operating in an integrated business planning organization. As one executive told us: “There is no place to hide.”

As we discussed in the first article of the retail sales and operations planning series, S&OP has been considered a best practice in the manufacturing industry for the past 25 years.

Sales and operations planning (S&OP) has been considered a best practice in the manufacturing industry for the past 25 years. Initially started as a process to balance demand and supply, S&OP has evolved into a more robust integrated business planning (IBP) process that links strategic plans with product portfolio reviews and new product introductions, unconstrained demand plans, supply plans and capabilities, and financial appraisals of the integrated business plans over a planning horizon of 24 months or more.

Sanofi-Aventis said that buying Canderm will allow it to consolidate its dermatology products under the Canderm umbrella to create a Canadian leader in its field and to double its Canadian healthcare sales.

 Founded in 1972, Canderm, which is based in the Montreal borough of St. Laurent, had 2009 sales of $24 million. It holds about 10 percent of the non-prescription anti-ageing skincare market in Canada.

The company's product range includes cosmeceuticals and dermatological products, injectable dermal fillers and over-the-counter products.

The plant, to be named Shams 1, will have a 100 megawatt capacity and would qualify for carbon credits under the United Nation's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). It will be constructed in the desert, 75 miles from Abu Dhabi.

The plant, which will cover an area of 2.5 square kilometres, is designed to offset the equivalent of 175,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. It will contain 768 parabolic trough collectors, to be supplied by Abengoa, with an initial operating lifespan of 25 years.