Spirituality and ethics play important roles in bringing justice for many business units. During the past few years, there has been growing concern on thinking about profitability without considering other aspects such as spirituality. The infamous Enron incident has been a crystal clear of a case of thinking just on short-term profitability without considering other ethical issues. Spirituality helps organizations create ethical values, responsibility and job satisfaction among workers and these issues could increase business competitive advantages. In this paper, we study the impact of spirituality on different levels of individual, workspace and organizational for a real-world case study. The survey results of this paper indicate that spirituality could significantly impact the organization in different levels.

Packaging plays an important role on marketing products and services in many competitive environments. A good packaging can increase sales of products, reduces the level of inventory, which yields to higher profitability. In this paper, we study the relationship between a good packaging program and customer's confidence as well as customer's attraction on purchasing goods and services. The paper uses a questionnaire based on Likert scale and distributes among the target population of this survey and the information of packaging are divided into two groups of visibility and informative. The results indicate that a good label with detailed and precise information on product could significantly impact customer's confidence while other visible information do not have much impact on customer's confidence.

Home appliances are considered as one of low margin and competitive industry in the world. This industry often needs significant amount of investment and resources and it often faces with some challenges during economic crises. In this paper, we present a framework for organizational excellence to detect any possible problems in home appliances industry. The proposed framework of this paper is used for a real-world case study of Iranian home appliances. The results of our survey indicate that there are four major dimensions involved with this industry including facilities, knowledge and skills, environment and vision. There are three criteria associated with facilities with 30 indexes, 14 criteria associated with knowledge and skills with 144 indexes, three criteria involved with environment with 33 indexes and five criteria linked with vision with 53 indexes. Therefore, home appliances in our case study needs 4 dimensions for achieving the organizational excellence.

Advertisement plays an important role on increasing sales and organizations normally spend significant amount of cost in an attempt to increase profitability. A productive advertisement normally involves various factors and we need to determine the most important ones, very carefully. In this paper, we use a questionnaire-based survey to find the most important factors influencing advertisement. In this paper, we focus on gathering information from the advertisement providers to assess each advertisement plan. The proposed study of this paper uses factor analysis to determine 15 most important factors, which include 42 variables.

In this paper, we present an empirical study to determine the effects of different barriers on using information technology for learning and teaching in elementary school students. We plan to find the most important factors preventing elementary school children on implementing different information technology facilities for their educational programs. The study selects a population of 720 women teachers who work for elementary schools and chooses a sample of 220 people for this study. A questionnaire consists of various important factors are distributed among these people and the results are analyzed using some statistical tests. The study indicates that education program itself is to blame as the most important barrier for using information technology.

The novel equivalent material concept, proposed originally by the author, was utilized together with the mean stress and the point stress failure concepts to predict the load-carrying capacity of O-notched ductile steel plates under pure tension. Unlike for V and U-notches, it was found that the point stress criterion combined with the equivalent material concept could estimate successfully the limited available experimental results reported in literature regarding four O-notched plates made of very ductile steel. By using the model, one may predict well the onset of tensile crack initiation in O-notched ductile components without requiring performing experiments or elastic-plastic analysis.

Semi-submersible drilling platforms are huge bulk structures for extracting the oil products from great depth of seas. For such bulk structures, the Morrison’s equations are no longer valid for determining the loads applied to the semi-submersible drilling platforms. The diffraction theory should be used for evaluating the hydrodynamic interactions between the platform and the sea waves. In this theory, the Laplace equation is solved by considering the boundary conditions of the diffraction theory. In this paper, after a brief description of the diffraction theory, the hydrodynamic interactions between the Iran’s Amirkabir semi-submersible drilling platform and the regular linear waves of Caspian Sea is investigated numerically using boundary element method in the ANSYS/AQWA software. The induced waves exciting forces and moments with different wave heading angles are estimated for six degrees of freedom relative to the waves frequencies using the diffraction theory. The performed hydrodynamic analysis is also validated with the previous works performed for Spar platforms.

Degradation of integral skin polyurethane foams (ISPUFs) was performed using diethylene glycol (DEG)/-sorbitol/water ternary green solvent system as an effective polyurethane bond destroying agent in combination with basic catalysts, namely sodium and potassium hydroxides, sodium acetate and sodium carbonate. The effects of studied catalysts were investigated and data showed the high performances of sodium hydroxide in recycling process. After completion of the reactions, appeared split phases contained recycled polyols in the upper phase. Reactions were studied using various DEG/-sorbitol/water ratios and the recovered polyols were characterized and data compared with an authentic sample.

The synthesis of Triphenylphosphonium trichloroiodoaluminate (III) ionic liquids (ILs) is reported here. The product was characterized by spectroscopic and analytical methods such as 31P-NMR, FT-IR, cyclic voltammetry, CHN, TGA and differential thermal analysis (DTA). Thermal analyses were used to investigate the thermal behavior of this compound. The results show that this ILs has excellent thermal stability below 110?C. Along with the experimental study; this compound has been studied computationally at the B3LYP/LANL2DZ level of theory using the Gaussian 98 program package. From these calculations, optimized geometries, molecular parameters, and vibrational spectra of ILs have been calculated. In addition, calculated frequencies are compared with the experimental frequencies after correction by the appropriate scaling factor. This comparison shows that our theoretical data are in good agreement with the experimental results.

In today & apos; s world, many planning problems include a hierarchical decision structure with independent and often conflicting objectives. Therefore, the optimization of supply chains with hierarchical structure is essential. In this paper, we investigate a fuzzy multi-objective multi-products supply chain optimization problem in a bi-level structure with one level corresponding to a manufacturer planning problem, while the other to K distribution centers problem. In our model, customer demand and supply chain costs are considered uncertain and will be modeled with use of fuzzy sets. We first describe how different kinds of problems can be modeled as bi-level programming problems. Then, this fuzzy model is first converted into an equivalent crisp model by using ?-cut method in each level, and then by applying extended Kuhn–Tucker approach, we have a linear multi-objective programming problem. Fuzzy goal programming technique is applied to solve the multi-objective linear programming problem to obtain a set of Pareto-optimal solutions. Finally, a numerical example is illustrated to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.