With superlative growth in the number of small organizations over the past two decades, the impact caused to environment due to higher production output is also immense. Most governments are continuously taking measures to mitigate the risks associated with industrial growth. One such measure is to implement green practices throughout the supply chain. Since small organizations are important part of supply chain and a major contributor of industrial output they also need to implement green supply chain practices. This paper aims to find out important enablers for green supply chain management (GSCM) from the view point of micro small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). Fuzzy analytical hierarchy process methodology has been used to rank the enablers, three important enablers were identified viz. top management commitment and finance, government support and regulations and recycling and reuse efforts. Managers of small organizations can benefit immensely by focusing on implementing these practices in their organizations.

This study aims to focus on the purchase intention of the consumer specifically the millennial age group with respect to the effect of Electronic word of mouth communication and brand image. The study is performed among the students of the University of Haripur. Study reveals that the effect of Electronic word of mouth and brand image for the purchase of consumer electronics products have positively correlated and the effect is significant, which means that the Word of mouth communication can positively respond to the purchase of the said products in case when the products are branded and have certain image in the mind of consumer.

In the light of recent excess of reported crimes in various states and union territories (UTs) of India, it becomes imperative to evaluate the police performance of different states/UTs in order to identify the poor/under-performing ones requiring immediate attention. Although, a limited amount of research work has been carried out in this area, mainly employing data envelopment analysis approach, a definitive ranking of Indian states/UTs with respect to their police performance has never been derived using any of the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques. Thus, the aim of this paper is focused on evaluating and ranking of all the Indian states/UTs with respect to their performance in minimizing criminal activities while employing additive ratio assessment (ARAS) method as a simplistic MCDM tool. It is revealed that Chandigarh evolves out as the best performer amongst all the 35 Indian states/UTs, while West Bengal comes out as the worst performer. A detailed analysis of the results is also carried out to identify those Indian states/UTs where substantial improvement can be brought in.

A novel one-pot, solvent-free method for the synthesis of dithiocarbamates was developed through the reaction of corresponding alkyl halides, amines and carbon disulfide employing catalytic amount of benzyl trimethyl ammonium hydroxide (Triton-B). The reaction conditions are milder with extremely simple work-up procedures than the reported methods, afforded high yields (82-98%) of the desired products.

The corrosion inhibition efficiencies of two novel Schiff bases, namely (E)-3-[thiophen-2-ylmethyleneamino]benzoic acid (T2YMABA) and (E)-4-(5-[(2-phenylhydrazono) methyl]thiophen-2-yl)benzoic acid (PHMT2YBA) on mild steel (MS) in 1.0M HCl solution has been investigated and compared using electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and potentiodynamic polarization analysis. The Schiff bases exhibited very good corrosion inhibitions on mild steel in 1.0M HCl medium and the inhibition efficiency increased with the increase in concentration of the inhibitor. Polarization studies revealed that T2YMABA acted as a mixed type inhibitor whereas PHMT2YBA molecules acted as anodic inhibitor.

In open travelling salesman subset-tour problem (OTSSP), the salesman needs to traverse a set of k (≤n) out of n cities and after visiting the last city, the salesman does not necessarily return to the central depot. The goal is to minimize the overall traversal distance of covering k cities. The OTSSP model comprises two types of problems such as subset selection and permutation of the cities. Firstly, the problem of selection takes place as the salesman’s tours do not contain all the cities. On the other hand, the next problem is about to determine the optimal sequence of the cities from the selected subset of cities. To deal with this problem efficiently, a hybrid nearest neighbor technique based crossover-free Genetic algorithm (GA) with complex mutation strategies is proposed. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first hybrid GA for the OTSSP. As there are no existing studies on OTSSP yet, benchmark instances are not available for OTSSP. For computational experiments, a set of test instances is created by using TSPLIB. The extensive computational results show that the proposed algorithm is having great potential in achieving better results for the OTSSP. Our proposed GA being the first evolutionary-based algorithm that will help as the baseline for future research on OTSSP.

A simple multi-attribute decision-making method based on ranking of alternatives and attributes is proposed in this paper. The method ranks the alternatives with respect to each of the attributes based on the corresponding performance measures. Similarly, the ranks are assigned to the attributes based on their importance as perceived by the decision maker. The ranks assigned to the alternatives with respect to each of the attributes and the ranks assigned to the attributes are converted to appropriate weights and the final composite scores of the alternatives are computed using these weights. An interesting feature of the proposed method is that the qualitative attributes (i.e. the attributes expressed in linguistic terms) need not require the use of fuzzy logic. The proposed method is very simple and useful in situations of limited time availability, presence of qualitative attributes, imprecise/incomplete/partial data, and decision maker’s limited attention and capability to process the information. The proposed method is proved easier and better compared to the other widely used decision-making methods. The proposed method will be tested further on more realistic problems of the industrial environment and the results will be reported soon.

Absenteeism is a major challenge for any organization in the current competitive world. Curbing absenteeism helps organizations achieve their targets and increases productivity. This study highlights the major causes of absenteeism in the production division of a garment industry under various dimensions, which influence on absenteeism like work environment, organizational culture, relation and co-operation, compensation and rewards, facilities, job satisfactory and security, and general factors. The Study helps to identify reasons for employee absenteeism in production division. Sample of 180 employees responses were considered for the study from the universe and the data were analysed, statistically. The study shows that the major factors like wages, other source of income, and bad relationship with supervisors were contributing to the major absence of employees from work. This clearly indicates that work environment, relation and co-operation, facilities provided by the organization and job satisfaction were the main components which are causing the employee absenteeism.

The main purpose of this research work is to present a reliability analysis of a two dissimilar parallel unit framework under the presumption that a framework’s unit may also fail during the preventive maintenance (PM). Only one repair man is available with the system. It has been assumed that he is well capable of doing every repair work including preventive maintenance. Here in this work we have assumed that failure and repair times of each unit are correlated. Utilizing regenerative point strategy different reliability attributes are obtained which are very much helpful to system/ framework designers and company managers. Graphical practices of mean time to system failure and profit/cost function have been studied.

Two sets of nine different silicon carbide particulate (SiCp) reinforced Al 7075 Metal Matrix Composites (MMCs) were fabricated using liquid metallurgy stir casting process. Mean particle size and weight percentage of the reinforcement were varied according to Taguchi L9 Design of Experiments (DOE). One set of the cast composites were then heat treated to T6 condition. Optical micrographs of the MMCs reveal consistent dispersion of reinforcements in the matrix phase. Mechanical properties were determined for both as-cast and heat treated MMCs for comparison of the experimental results. Linear regression models were developed for mechanical properties of the heat treated MMCs using list square method of regression analysis. The fabrication process parameters were then optimized using Taguchi based grey relational analysis for the multiple mechanical properties of the heat treated MMCs. The largest value of mean grey relational grade was obtained for the composite with mean particle size 6.18 µm and 25 weight % of reinforcement. The optimal combination of process parameters were then verified through confirmation experiments, which resulted 42% of improvement in the grey relational grade. Finally, the percentage of contribution of each process parameter on the multiple performance characteristics was calculated through Analysis of Variance (ANOVA).