An organization has to make the right decisions in time depending on demand information to enhance the commercial competitive advantage in a constantly fluctuating business environment. Therefore, estimating the demand quantity for the next period most likely appears to be crucial. Manufacturing companies consider forecasting a crucial process for effectively guiding several activities, and research has devoted particular attention to this issue. The objective of the paper is to propose a new forecasting mechanism which is modeled by integrating Fuzzy Delhi Method (FDM) with Artificial Neural Network (ANN) techniques to manage the demand with incomplete information. Artificial neural networks has been applied as it is capable to model complex, nonlinear processes without having to assume the form of the relationship between input and output variables. The effectiveness of the proposed approach to the demand forecasting issue is demonstrated for a 20/25 MVA Distribution Transformer from Energypac Engineering Limited, a leading power engineering company of Bangladesh.

One of the most important issues in privatization is to measure the impact of such decisions on improving efficiency of governmental organizations. Privatization, in the past, has had both positive and negative consequences in different countries. Therefore, it is necessary to measure the impact of privatization in Iran to see the outcome of such decision. In this paper, we present an empirical study to measure the financial performance of the privatized firms three years before and three years after privatization happed using pairwise t-student. We use five financial figures of asset turnover, working capital turnover, return on assets, return on equity and earnings per share. The results indicate that there was no meaningful relationship between these financial figures before and after privatization occurred.

Contractor selection is a critical activity, which plays an important role in the overall success of any construction project. The implementation of fuzzy multiple criteria decision attribute (MCDA) in selecting contractors has the advantage of rendering subjective and implicit decision making more objective and transparent. An additional merit of fuzzy MCDA is the ability to accommodate quantitative and qualitative information. In this paper, an integrated VIKOR–AHP methodology is proposed to make a selection among the alternative contractors in one of Iranian construction industry projects. In the proposed methodology, the weights of the selection criteria are determined by fuzzy pairwise comparison matrices of AHP.

Entrepreneurship development is a complex process, which plays long-term and pervasive role in the economical development of the countries. In order to become aware of the level of entrepreneurship, many countries are interested in making comparison between their own experiences and policies and those of others which have been successful in developing entrepreneurship. This study aims at making a comparative investigation of entrepreneurship in Iran and countries of global entrepreneurship monitor. Structural equation modeling was used to study the effect of independent variables of entrepreneurial activities and entrepreneurial perceptions between 2008 until 2010. The results show that entrepreneurial perceptions have a significant effect on entrepreneurial activities and observed variables have a complete positive relationship with each other.

One of the essential functions of human resource management is to take care of skilled employees. The process is normally divided into two categories: first category includes different activities such as having health and safety in working centers, performing healthy and sport programs and some other similar activities to save and improve employees' physical characteristics. The second group includes other important issues normally called benefit packages, which includes good health insurance and retiring plans. Whenever an organization provides good benefit package and supporting programs, there is a better job satisfaction among employee. In this paper, the effects of related services to support employee to reach job satisfaction and employee activities in one of Iranian banks called Mellat bank is investigated using 276 random samples. The results show that employees are relatively satisfied from the benefit package of the bank and they were relatively happy on working for such organization.

Intellectual capital (IC) is normally used to create value for organizations and in today & apos; s business environment; the success of each organization depends on managing such assets. During the past few years, many organizations implement IC to increase their competitive advantages. Hospitals are among business units where IC plays an important role on the success of these units. People normally choose hospitals based not only based on their equipments but also based on the specialists and physicians they have. In this paper, we present an empirical study to measure the impact of IC in accounting parts of hospitals. The results of our regression analysis indicates that when there is a unit increase in either of human, customer, structural or intellectual capital individually, we can expect of an increase of 1.278, 1.210, 1.415 and 1.620 units increase in the performance of the university, respectively.

Inter-organizational communication plays an important role in promoting strategic collaboration among firms. It can improve productivity and increases collaboration among employees. In this paper, we present an empirical study to measure the role of inter-organizational communication on efficiency among administration employees who work for one the oldest banks in Iran, Bank Melli Iran. The study uses 380 full time employees who work for 28 different administration divisions of this bank. The survey uses a questionnaire consists of 19 questions about inter-organizational communication and 25 questions about efficiency of employees. The reliability of the survey has been approved using an initial survey and Cronbach alpha was calculated as 0.87, which is well above the minimum acceptable level. The result of our survey confirms there is a meaningful relationship between inter-organizational communication and efficiency of all administration employees who work for this bank. There is also a meaningful relationship between age and efficiency and the maximum efficiency belongs to people aged 31 to 40. According to our survey, men have more inter-organizational efficiency than women do. The result of our survey also confirms that positivism impacts more than other factors on efficiency. Among five effective factors, empathy has the most impact and responsiveness 6 efficiency dimensions.

These days, there is a tight competition among business units and all production units or service businesses attempt to use different techniques to increase their market shares. In such environment, customer normally says the last word, in fact, customer plays an important role and in many organizations, it is considered as part of their assets. The purpose of this paper is to propose a hybrid method to detect important criteria using Kano three-dimensional method and prioritize them using analytical hierarchy process. We implement the proposed model of this paper for one of Iranian banks called Bank Melli Iran. The study determines 25 different attributes, categorizes them in three different groups based on Kano model, and ranks them in terms of customers and employees & apos; perspective. The results of the survey indicate that customer and employees mostly have similar views since there are 21 common attributes between them. However, the priorities of these 21 items are often different in terms of two groups of employees and customers.

Measuring technical efficiency of different industries plays an important role on making managerial decisions. In this paper, we present an empirical study to measure technical efficiencies of various industries based on two-digit ISIC classification method in Iran. The proposed model uses stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and implements maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to estimate the parameters. The proposed study gathers the necessary data from year 2001 to year 2008 and implemented two methods where the second method is an extended model by using energy as part of efficiency estimation. The results of the survey indicate that auto industry was the most productive sector followed by equipments and the paper industry was among inefficient sectors.

The purpose of present research is to study the relationship between job performance and employees’ mental health in one of Iranian natural gas refinery located in city of Jam, Iran. Data collection was conducted based on two major characteristics of job performance and mental health based on questionnaire methods among 42 people. The methodology is descriptive and correlation – type and to analyze the data, Pearson’s correlation coefficient, variances equality tests as well as t-student were utilized. The findings show that there was a significant relationship between employees’ job performance and mental health and any increase in mental health aspects promotes job performance proportionally. In the meantime, there was no significant relationship between employees’ job performance and their gender and there was no significant difference on mental health status between male and female staff. Based on the results, one can conclude that low mental health level among employees can reduce their performance. Managers should use proper methods to decrease the negative consequences resulted from the lack of mental health in workplaces.