EDITORIAL

Note from the editor

"When any real progress is made, we unlearn and learn anew what we thought we knew before."

Henry David Thoreau

(Welcoming Note, SAIIE NeXXXt Conference)

Two related communities in Industrial Engineering held their annual conferences in South Africa recently:

• the 30^th annual conference of the Southern African Institute for Industrial Engineering (SAIIEneXXXt) (30 Sept-2 Oct 2019 at The Boardwalk Hotel, Port Elizabeth),

• the 20^th annual international conference of the Rapid Product Development Association of South Africa (RAPDASA) (6-8 November 2019, Emoya Estate, Bloemfontein).

To promote the high quality of work delivered to these two conferences and to encourage authors to present some of their best research, we introduced a Special Edition of the journal in 2016 in which the best research presented at the abovementioned conferences would be published.

The same double blind peer review process and criteria used for the journal were also used in this selection process, and the feedback from all reviewers was used to score and rank all conference submissions to create a final shortlist. Each submission on the final shortlist was then checked for quality and suitability by the editors of the journal.

As a consequence, this special edition has a total of 24 articles:

• twenty originated from SAIIENeXXXt out of a total of 183 submissions on the program, that resulted eventually in 80 accepted peer review papers, and

• RAPDASA, four articles were selected out of 35.

The special edition is a recipe that is continuing to work well, in that it lifts the standard of submissions at the conferences, and it creates an opportunity for young authors to have quality work rewarded!

Corne Schutte

Editor