10. Norilsk Nickel

Norilsk Nickel is a nickel and palladium  mining  and smelting  company. Its largest operations are located in the Norilsk–Talnakh  area, in northern Russia. MMC stands for "Mining and Metallurgical Company".

Germany-based BASF will buy Cognis from its owners—the US investment bank Goldman Sachs and the UK private equity group Permira—at an equity purchasing price of €700 million.

BASF said that it expects the household products additives maker to help it weather economic turbulence. BASF's core chemicals and plastics business currently relies on industries such as automotive and construction, both of which have been hit hard by the global economic crisis.

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.