Note from the editor

Abstract

As reported in February’s editorial, we are in a process of renewing our journal. The biggest change has been to quicken our review process. If you scroll through this month’s journal articles, you will notice some articles where the review process took only 4 months. The biggest challenge remains our reviewers’ turnaround time – the review process is often a low priority item in busy academic careers. But we had made good progress with working down the queue, clearing our old dormant journal articles. Making the management process also faster. We are also managing as planned to move the first 2 editions of the year a month earlier – the second edition in the past appeared at the end of August, but now it is end of July. As reported in the previous edition, we are testing a new version of our web based software. The SAIIE Annual Awards nominations closed recently, and as reported earlier, this award is now limited to journal articles published in this journal. We are looking forward to congratulate the 2022 winner in the next edition! Due to changes in the previous Technical Editor’s personal circumstances, it was not possible for her to continue as Technical Editor. I am thus pleased to introduce Mr Eldon Burger, who took over this role recently. Eldon is a lecturer at the Department of Industrial Engineering at Stellenbosch, he did his undergraduate studies at North-West University, then a BTech in Industrial Engineering at Unisa, a Masters in Computer Science / Data Science at University of Debrecen, Hungary, and is now busy with his PhD with a focus on Data Science. Welcome Eldon! Our next edition will be the special edition, where we take the best submissions from related conferences in South Africa, and publish it in the journal. That review process is already underway, and we are looking forward to showcase the research and new thinking from those conferences. This edition has a total of 12 articles, with seven articles from authors with South African connections and the balance from international authors. The publication date is 29 July, which is a month earlier than 2021. If you have suggestions on how we can take this journal forward, please let me know.