This paper aims to provide a fuzzy framework for aligning human resources strategies with busi-ness strategies at The University of Applied Science and Technology. This research is an applied research based on the purpose and the research time horizon is cross sectional. In this research, 15 experts are identified using snowball method. The necessary data are gathered based on 3 questionnaires including Delphi questionnaire, human resources (HR) and business strategic questionnaire. The results show that some couples of HR strategies were aligned with business strategies. Then “if-then” rules are described in FuzzyTech software and the study determines which business strat-egies must be aligned with human resources strategies using the analysis. The paper ends by providing some suggestions based on 16 possible scenarios.

Cell formation and layout design are two important steps for the implementation of the production systems. The existing models majorly have focused on the cell formation issue and the layout design of machines, but have paid little attention to the placement of cells in dynamic environment. In addition, in most of the available papers, binary variables have been used for cell formation, and other information such as volume of production, operation sequences and production costs have played unimportant roles in the structure of the existing models. In this paper, a nonlinear program-ming model under potentially dynamic conditions is proposed which minimizes the cost associated with the difference between the estimated demands from its expected value. The other purpose of the proposed model includes minimization of the total costs of inter/intra cellular movements of elements (forward and backward movements), the existence of exceptional elements, intercellular displacement of machines and cellular reconfiguration and operational costs and constant cost of machineries. The problem is solved via GAMS and a Genetic Algorithm (GA) is employed to solve the large sized problems and the results are analyzed.

The purpose of this experiment is to investigate the effect of the environmental scent on the sensory and physical aspects of the consumer's experience. Samples were tested in a pre-test and post-test group for two days with one week interval. At the time of the post-test, the subjects were exposed to a gardening fragrance when exposed to customer service. In this paper, an independent variable called environmental notes and six dependent variables including feelings of comfort, perception of waiting time, perceived service quality, loyalty, charming sensation, and service satisfaction were used for testing. This research is, in terms of purpose or orientation, applied and operational, descriptive and experimental. In this study, alternative assumptions about the effect of the environmental scent on feelings of comfort, perception of waiting time, loyalty and charming sensation were approved, but the effect of the environmental scent on perceived service quality of service and service satisfaction were not approved. According to the results of this research, it can be said that consumers’ environmental perception had a positive impact on the sensory dimension of customer’s experience in customer service, but did not affect their physical experiences.

Integrated supplier selection and order allocation is a complex problem that is important for both designing and operating supply chains. It becomes especially complicated when quantity discounts are considered at the same time. Under such circumstances, most studies often formulate the problem as a Multi-Objective Linear Programming problem (MOLP), and then transform it to a Mixed Integer Programming problem (MIP) to handle the inherited multi-objectives, simultaneously. But, objectives are not of equal importance and in this approach scaling and subjective weighting often are not considered. In addition, some of the studies that use weighting method to solve the MOLP, usually ignore to normalize the coefficients. However, as different coefficients have different units such as cost or number coefficients, so weighted summation will be meaningless. Furthermore, in most of the studies only quantitative criteria are considered in mathematical model. But, the importance of some qualitative criteria persuade decision maker to consider other affective criteria as well as cost. In this study, in order to ease the problem and to obtain a more reasonable compromised solution for order allocating among suppliers, an integration of analytical hierarchy process and linear integer and multi-objective programming is proposed. The large number of criteria and attributes are employed in this problem and they are employed in a comprehensive model to solve the multi-objective problem and to find the most preferred non dominated solutions by considering decision maker’s (DM) preferences. Some illustrative examples are solved using LINGO and the results are compared. The sensitivity analysis and comparing the results with one of the well-known studies in the literature has demonstrated the flexibility and efficiency of the proposed model to deal with large sized problems and incorporate different purchasing policies, easily and in a short amount of time.

Many financial crisis are related to public corporations, which are increasing. Many investors and creditors are having trouble predicting a financial crisis, especially when managing profits. Recent studies identify the factors associated with earnings management to determine the relationship between the factors and manipulated profits. In order to reduce the risk of financial crises and to help investors avoid large losses in the stock market, it is necessary to develop a model for predicting profit management. In addition, for traditional auditing technologies, it is also difficult to limit the time, human resources, costs, and the impact of abnormal behaviors on complex and large financial information. Therefore, developing a prediction model for managing profits for auditors is useful in identifying the degree of manipulation in financial statements. This paper examines the effect of corporate financial distress on unpredicted net earnings and corporate profits on accepted companies in Tehran Stock Exchange over the period 2010-2015. The models used to test the hypotheses of the research are linear regression using panel data. The results show that the coefficients of the financial distress, institutional ownership, annual sales growth, company loss, company size, the company's market share and firm fixed costs are statistically meaningful. In other words, these independent variables influence on unforeseeable profit and earnings management.

The factors affecting the success of knowledge management (KM) tools play an important role in knowledge processes. This research investigates the factors affecting the success of KM tools in the research projects of a corporate university. The research method is descriptive and the statistical population of the study consisted of all professors and knowledge workers of a university. 147 of them were selected through a targeted sampling method. Data collection was conducted through a questionnaire. To determine the validity of the questionnaire, content and formal validity were used and its reliability was calculated by using Cronbach's alpha with the value calculated of 0.83. Data were analyzed by using descriptive statistics, t-test and Friedman test. In this study, the factors of culture, information technology, strategy and goal, organizational infrastructure, employee motivation, leadership and management support, human resources management, education, financial resources, measurement, processes and activities, structure and communications in the knowledge management cycle of research projects of the university studied were identified as the effective factors in the KM cycle.

Information Technology (IT) plays an essential role on development of effective supply chain planning and it can improve the supply chain performance, either directly or indirectly. As a national industry, the National Iranian Oil Products Distribution Company involves a large number of organizations within its supply chain. Therefore, this descriptive-survey uses information sharing indicators, fuzzy TOPSIS technique based on managers and expert opinions to evaluate and to rank some oil products distribution companies. Data are analyzed and the results show that Oil Products Distribution Company of Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari received the highest rank and Farsan maintained the lowest rank compared with other regional companies.

Organizational commitment plays an essential role on the success of service businesses as well as municipalities. One of the primary challenges on such firms is to face with rumors and silence, properly. In fact, organizational rumors and silence are two important issues which influence on employees’ organizational commitment. This paper studies the relationship between organizational silence and commitment by controlling organizational rumors. The study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among some employees who worked for a municipality firm in Iran. The results indicate that organizational silence had a negative relationship with organizational commitment by controlling organizational rumors. Likewise, without controlling organizational rumors, the impact of organizational silence or organizational commitment was increased, negatively. Also, the re-search indicates that there was a strong significant relationship between organizational silence and organizational rumors and organizational silence could improve organizational rumors, significantly.

With the rapid increase of energy demand, it is becoming increasingly important to obtain accurate energy demand forecasts. To incorporate long time causal relationships, autoregressive with exoge-nous regression components models have received increasing attention from many researchers in this field. These are linear models applied through hybrid methodology of time series and econo-metrics, however, some recent studies find evidences that nonlinear models outperform over linear ones in long term peak demand forecasting. This paper proposed a nonlinear Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average with Exogenous Inputs (N-ARIMAX) model to forecast sectoral peak demand using a case study of Iran. The results indicate that significant improvements in forecasting accuracy are obtained with the proposed models compared to the existing models.

The term virtual organization is used to describe the organizations that are united with other organizations to benefit from the relative advantages of other organizations. These organizations are established based on different patterns to use information technology for building quick, cheap, and easy communications. Virtual organizations use effective and useful strategies to keep up with the rapid and fundamental changes in the new world. Information Technology (IT) is a facilitator that has made it possible to create virtual organizations. In these organizations, indicators such as the level of collaboration with partners, the rate of the implementation of IT and other issues such as how to work together based on mutual trust, how to choose partners and how to resolve disputes with partners are used to form the virtual teams to help determine the viability of the organizations. The virtual organization, as a fact, is the result of technological advancements and creativity in organizing firms to face with the turbulent environment and features of the post-industrial age. In today's world of business, virtual organizations are trying to benefit from knowledge-based employees, who have high flexibility and significant efficiency to respond to the needs of a turbulent market and to create significant competitive advantage. In order to benefit from such organizations, their managerial issues should be identified and organized in a good manner. This study examines the relationship between the degree of organization's virtualization and the organizational ability (employees). The study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among some experts and, using Pearson correlation test, examines the hypotheses of the survey. The results indicate that there was a significant difference between the degree of virtualization of organization and organizational ability.