Note from the editor

• Corne Schutte Editor: SAJIE Department of Industrial Engineering, Stellenbosch University http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0119-720X

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7166/25-3-1107

Abstract

"Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago" - Warren Buffett

As we were preparing the November edition of the journal, I received very sad news on Sunday morning 26 October: Prof Kris Adendorff had passed away during the night. Prof Adendorff is considered by many to be the father of Industrial Engineering in South Africa. Through his wisdom, vision, leadership and endless energy, the Industrial Engineering discipline was established as an academic programme at most of the major academic universities in South Africa in the 60’s and 70’s. For many of us, he was our teacher, mentor, study leader, colleague and friend.

He was also a founding member of the Southern African Institute for Industrial Engineering (SAIIE), the institute sponsoring this journal, and was a very active reviewer for this journal. Referring to Warren Buffett’s quote above, we are all enjoying not only the shade, but also the fruits of the tree planted by Prof Adendorff.

We spoke just a week before his passing – he and Prof Paul Kruger had a submission in the review process, and he made me promise that I personally would also read and review this. As a tribute to this great man who had given so much to our discipline, the feature article in this edition is this very last submission from Prof Adendorff.

Due to a more scalable editorial process where we use section editors to manage the review process:

• The average publication time for a submission reduced to 183 days in 2014, from 240 days in 2013. We foresee that this will reduce further in future – ideally, I would like this to be somewhere between 120 and 150 days.
• The number of submissions per edition is increasing. The average number or articles per edition was typically 16 the last two years, with this one already 17, and we would like this to be about 20 in 2015.

While international exposure for a journal is a good thing, this is a journal with a regional Southern African focus, sponsored by the Southern African Institute for Industrial Engineering, and we are attempting to publish articles that are of interest to the Industrial Engineering, Engineering Management and related disciplines in this region. Consequently, we are aiming to have a healthy balance of international and local authors publishing here. In this edition, ten of the seventeen articles are from South African authors, the balance from international authors.

If you have suggestions on how we can take this journal forward, please let me know. C.S.L. Schutte: Editor