Today, supply chains have been widely welcomed by industry researchers and the results of applying it may increase throughput, reduce cost, increase speed to meet customers’ needs and create competitive opportunities. This paper identifies a scientific method, which operates efficiently and effectively manages supply chain operations. In this paper, a computer simulation model is analyzed for analyzing the supply chain and the results are examined, accordingly. Using Taguchi design of experiment and running the proposed model under L27 scenarios, a two-objective optimization was performed on the estimated response surfaces, leading to a 60% increase in productivity and 40% reduction in waiting time.

Demand uncertainty obliges all participants through a supply chain to make decisions under uncertainty. These decisions extend across price, investment, production, and inventory quantities. We take account of competition between two supply chains under demand uncertainty. These chains internally are involved in vertical pricing competition; however, they externally participate in horizontal pricing and service level competitions by offering a single-type product to the market. Since firms may have various attitudes against demand uncertainty and its related risks, different risk structures for competitive supply chains are considered. We assume that risk-averse firms are able to decrease demand uncertainty by information gathered from market research. For risk-averse participants in a chain, market research investment is an appropriate ground for vertical coordination, which diminishes risk through a supply chain. Optimal strategies based on game theory are obtained for different risk structures; furthermore, for each structure the effects of risk sensitivity as well as market research efficiency on these optimal strategies are investigated. Finally, we propose two scenarios for information sharing between risk-averse participants.

This paper presents an empirical investigation for line balancing in aluminum industry. Assembly line problems (ALB) are divided into three types, single-model assembly lines to handle (easy) problems to build a product that is designed to build one kind of product, multiple and mixed model to design for different kinds of products. This paper is an effort to describe comprehensively the solution to the problem for single-model assembly lines using some practical software package named FLB. The primary objective of aluminum assembly line balancing is optimal deployment activities subject to various limitations. The preliminary results of this paper indicate that the implementation of line balancing could reduce make span, significantly.

This study attempts to assess the moderating impact of recently introduced tourist relationship management (TRM) framework on service quality perception-tourist satisfaction-destination loyalty link. Tourist relationship management framework draws inspiration from customer relationship management (CRM) model with validated addition of dimensions compatible to tourism dynamics. The study, carried out in Santiniketan, India, confirmed moderating impact of dimensional performance of tourist relationship management on perceived tourism service quality-tourist satisfaction-destination loyalty link.

Research in the field of export marketing suggests that resources play an important role in providing necessary investments for development of businesses for exporting goods and services. The present study examines the factors influencing brand advantage for export ventures in small and medium firms (SMEs) located in city of Tehran, Iran. In this survey, we choose a sample of 256 managers of the SMEs randomly and distribute a questionnaire among them in Likert scale. Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.770, which is well above the minimum desirable level. Using principal component analysis, the study has detected six factors including organizational advantages, future studies, position of the firm in the market, product capability, the consumer & apos; s image and development tools influencing the most on export development. The implementation of structural equation modeling has also determined positive as well as negative impact of the factors on export ventures.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to identify and rank the factors of information market development systems influencing on the market share development. The population of this survey includes all managers who work for SMEs in city of Tehran, Iran. The study selects a sample of 230 people randomly and a questionnaire is distributed among them in Likert scale. Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.814, which is well above the minimum desirable level. Using structural equation modeling the study has determined seven factors including valid data, information, strategic information, organizational information, supportive information, customer information, development information and data analysis, which influence market share development.

This work deals with production scheduling problem in an assembly flow shop, having parts machining followed by their subsequent assembly operations. Limited heuristics available on the problem, are based on unrealistic assumption that every part is processed on all machines. In this paper, two heuristics NEH_BB and Disjunctive are proposed to solve assembly flow shop scheduling problem where every part may not be processed on each machine. Exhaustive computational experiments are conducted with 60 trials each. The methods are found to be applicable to large size problems. The objective functions used for comparison are makespan and computational time. Disjunctive method takes very less computational time as compared to NEH_BB and hence claimed to be the better among available approaches for finding solution in assembly flow shop problems.

An innovative price plan monitoring and advisory system simulates subscriber usage consumption for offering suitable price plan. The aim of this paper is to develop the decision support system by using Statistical Process Control (SPC) to identify subscriber usage behavior and provide critical visibility into subscriber consumption to detect their inappropriate usage especially in exceeding usage. To explore subscriber usage behavior, a forecasting model and a regression is employed to identify related factors and predictive usage model. The innovative price plan monitoring and advisory system has been verified and validated with one of the largest telecommunication company in Thailand. Using decision support system with effective control chart and real subscriber behavior pattern help mobile network operator grow their revenues and profits by offering an appropriate price plan as well as improve subscriber experience with more flexible choice to meet their individual usage consumption needs.

Enterprise Resource Planning System is an important investment for organizations and determines future competitiveness and performance of a firm, which could be substantially effective. The primary objective of enterprise resource planning systems is to consolidate operational procedures among various departments, management information systems and resource allocation of the companies. Given the fact that the selection process for enterprise resource planning system is a multi-criteria decision problem and there are some ambiguities with various criteria, the use of fuzzy logic is inevitable, therefore, in this study, the main indices and standardized evaluation software enterprise resource planning system identification were used to rank six software packages including Oracle, SAP, SSA Global Solution, Sage Group, Microsoft Business Solution, People Soft focus. The results indicate that the highest priority is associated with the SAP software.

In decision making when multiple criteria are determined, the best choice depends on having complete information and proper decision-making technique. The permutation method is one of the popular techniques used in the context of multiple criteria decision making (MCDM). In this paper, a method is presented where there is more than one vector of weights for the criteria and there are uncertainties associated with criteria weights or there are multiple decision makers. We first take different weight vectors to create a multi-objective problem and then we solve them simultaneously to achieve appropriate Pareto solutions of the permutation method. Therefore, MOPSO and NSGA-II algorithms are utilized to find non-dominated solutions. Some examples in different sizes are considered to compare the efficiency of the proposed methods. Results show that by increasing the number of options and considering the computational time, the proposed methods perform better compared with the exact method. Moreover, NSGA-II is more efficient than MOPSO for the considered problem.