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.

A memorandum of understanding for the Interconnection Turkey-Greece-Italy project, or ITGI, was signed yesterday in Ankara between Edison, Turkey’s state- run natural gas company Botas and Greek natural gas company Depa.

The ITGI project aims to transport an annual eight billion cubic metres of gas to Italy by upgrading existing infrastructure in Turkey and Greece and building a final link to Italy.

National Starch, a subsidiary of the former UK group ICI, was taken over by Netherlands-based AkzoNobel as part of its acquisition of ICI in January 2008, but isn't considered part of AkzoNobel's core business. AkzoNobel is the largest coatings and specialty chemicals company in the world.
In 2009 National Starch had revenue of $1.2 billion from sales of specialty starches to local and multinational customers in the food, papermaking, consumer and industrial markets. With 2,250 employees around the world, it operates 11 plants in eight countries.