This paper presents the decentralized supply chain with two suppliers and two competing retailers. It also investigates the sourcing and pricing strategies of two retailers in a decentralized supply chain system under a supply disruption environment. These retailers face their individual stochastic demand markets; however, they compete with each other through a two-stage price and service operation. The interactive dynamics among retailers is characterized, including the existence and uniqueness of the Nash Equilibrium in service and price games demonstrated.

The theory of constraints (TOC) is a management tool, which considers any manageable system as being limited in reaching more of its objectives by some constraints. According to TOC, there is always, at least, one single constraint, and TOC implements a concentrating process to detect the constraint and restructure the remaining of the organization around it. This paper presents an overview of different perspectives of TOC and its implementation in different industries such as project management, quality management, outsourcing, product mix, make-to-buy, accounting, banking and health care, etc. The results indicate that the method has been extensively implemented in different areas of accounting.

Solving resource constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) has important role in the context of project scheduling. Considering a single objective RCPSP, the goal is to find a schedule that minimizes the makespan. This is NP-hard problem (Blazewicz et al., 1983) and one may use meta-heuristics to obtain a global optimum solution or at least a near-optimal one. Recently, various meta-heuristics such as ACO, PSO, GA, SA etc have been applied on RCPSP. Bee algorithms are among most recently introduced meta-heuristics. This study aims at adapting artificial bee colony as an alternative and efficient optimization strategy for solving RCPSP and investigating its performance on the RCPSP. To evaluate the artificial bee colony, its performance is investigated against other meta-heuristics for solving case studies in the PSPLIB library. Simulation results show that the artificial bee colony presents an efficient way for solving resource constrained project scheduling problem.

During the past few years, electronic marketing has gained significant portion of market share in the world. People become familiar with various products and services through the magic of internet and they could make their purchase with an ease of a click of a button. This paper presents an investigation on important factors influencing e-marketing in banking industry in city of Tehran, Iran. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale consists of 19 questions, distributes it among 250 Iranian experts and analyzes it based on principal component analysis. During the survey, the number of questions are reduced to 16. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.90 and Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Approx. Chi-Square are 0.939 and 2938, respectively. Based on the results of our survey, we have derived two factors including environmental factors as well as information technology.

A new and simple method for the preconcentration and spectrophotometric determination of trace amounts of nickel was developed by cloud point extraction (CPE). In the proposed work, dimethylglyoxime (DMG) was used as the chelating agent and Triton X-114 was selected as a non-ionic surfactant for CPE. The parameters affecting the cloud point extraction including the pH of sample solution, concentration of the chelating agent and surfactant, equilibration temperature and time were optimized. Under the optimum conditions, the calibration graph was linear in the range of 10-150 ng mL-1 with a detection limit of 4 ng mL-1. The relative standard deviation for 9 replicates of 100 ng mL-1 Ni(II) was 1.04%. The interference effect of some anions and cations was studied. The method was applied to the determination of Ni(II) in water samples with satisfactory results.

This paper presents an investigation on the role of human resource management on enterprise resource planning in one of higher educational systems in city of Tehran, Iran. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale consists of 30 questions, distributes it among some Iranian experts and analyzes it based on principal component analysis. During the survey, the number of questions are reduced to 20. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.86 and Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Approx. Chi-Square are 0.716 and 1169, respectively. Based on the results of our survey, we have derived five factors including environment analysis, infrastructure components, managerial decisions, integrated information systems and control components.

In today & apos; s competitive world, productivity- as a core source of production - is the most important target of the organization. Experimental studies in developed industrial countries prove that productivity improvements resulted from development of management systems play a more important role in production than physical increases in labor and capital factors. This paper, while focusing on productivity from a CRM perspective, employs a European Organizational Excellence Model framework to identify factors affecting productivity and the role of CRM systems. We perform an empirical study for a case study of home appliance manufacturing and using a questionnaire computed present status and compared with desired status of CRM components such as customer leadership, strategy, skill and motivation of labor work, effective use of information technology and process management.

This research investigates the human-behavioral dimension of technology acceptance in enterprises. It is evident that accepting a technology depends on the underlying circumstances of the environment. We have approached this issue from two different angles of social and technological architecture. The research tries to explore proper enterprise architecture for ERP system acceptance. Social Architecture (SA) is defined as the set of circumstances that makes people behave in a particular way. So behavior of persons (employees of an enterprise) can be a function of SA. Hence acceptance of a system can be dictated by SA and manipulating SA can result in desirable success for a technology system. We have achieved various variables of social architecture and have examined their relevance to system acceptance and success in related enterprises (research domain) beside technological architecture variables.
The results have indicated that a special form of social and technological architecture can lead to success for ERP system in the enterprises of the research domain. This gave us a model of architecture.

Distribution network design is an important issue in supply chain management and plays an important role in making new market development. Because of JIT philosophy, most of managers now have focused on designing appropriate distribution networks. Thus, categorizing distributors and selecting the best ones are crucial for companies. This paper provides a new method to categorize and select distributors. The fuzzy Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) algorithm is utilized to categorize distributors according to their similarity. To improve the performance of the algorithm, we train the algorithm using the past data. Finally, a numerical example is illustrated to examine the validity of the proposed algorithm.

Railroad maintenance engineering plays an important role on availability of roads and reducing the cost of railroad incidents. Rail is of the most important parts of railroad industry, which needs regular maintenance since it covers a significant part of total maintenance cost. Any attempt on optimizing total cost of maintenance could substantially reduce the cost of railroad system and it can reduce total cost of the industry. The paper presents a new method to estimate the cost of rail failure using different cost components such as cost of inspection and cost of risk associated with possible accidents. The proposed model of this paper is used for a real-world case study of railroad transportation of Tehran region and the results have been analyzed.