Cutting across the Isthmus of Panama, the Panama Canal is a 77.1 kilometre ship canal connecting the Atlantic Ocean, via the Caribbean Sea, to the Pacific Ocean and a hugely important conduit for international maritime trade, providing work markets with a time and cost effective crossing. Indeed the Panama Canal has had a massive transformative effect on world maritime commerce over the year, while from a local perspective it contributes some 20 percent of Panama’s total gross domestic product.

IMA stands for Innovative Mineral Analyzers and here is a company that does exactly what its name says. IMA is a technology front-runner in mining on-line analysis, and if that sounds dry, for mining companies concerned to occupy the critical space between metal prices and extraction costs material analysis can well be what decides viability. You can't plan based on what you don't know and IMA gives you the critical information often missing in mining; the value of the ore.

Based in Perth, Western Australia, and listed on the Australian Securities exchange (ASX), Continental Coal is a mining company with an Australian accent – which means it understands coal production and, even more importantly, the market that is blotting up most of the world’s coal and promises to do so for a long time. This is of course Asia, and notably China and India.

Being the world’s most successful networking company Cisco’s ubiquity is a given and it has been ‘present’ in Malta as throughout Europe and the Mediterranean area for decades through its channel partners. However its physical presence only dates from 2008, when an office was set up under its current manager Ruben Azzopardi, a man with a deep understanding of Cisco’s products and capabilities as a senior executive at one of its principal local customers.

I was in 1902 that a mining engineer by the name of Georges Bia first opened up a sales office in Brussels. It is here that the routes of the BIA Group can be traced back to. Today, 113 years later, BIA exists as a leading international company in the field of machine distribution for the civil engineering and construction industries, with its head offices remaining in Belgium.

Operational Excellence is not a continuous improvement initiative, nor a lean program where we seek out waste and eliminate it. It is very tangible and real, and has practical definition that applies to everyone in the organization: Operational Excellence is when, “Each and every employee can see the flow of value to the customer, and fix that flow before it breaks down.” But Operational Excellence is not easy to achieve.

Several years ago, a company that produced capital equipment initiated a firm-wide project designed to gain an advantage against competitors in a market that cared about both product quality and cost. The firm’s leadership put pressure on basically every department in the organization to come up with new ideas that could translate into marketplace success. Their efforts yielded some results, but the outcome fell far short of what had been hoped when the project had been started.

The purchase of the airports and other assets from the Spanish firm Abertis will cost a total of 284 million euros. The move, which does still require the approval of minority shareholders and US regulators, will see ADC & HAS Airports Worldwide add to its portfolio, which includes interests in airports in Costa Rica and Ecuador.