Medical tourism industry is an international phenomenon, which most of medical tourists for some reasons such as high costs of treatment, long waiting queues, lack of insurance and lack of access to health care in the origin country, travel long distances to benefit from health care services of destination country. Given the competitive nature of this industry, most countries are designing practical and legal services and planning for their development. For this purpose, this study has been conducted to develop a strategic planning framework for development of medical tourism industry in Yazd province of Iran; because in recent years Yazd has recognized as the health pole by patients in developing countries. In sum, emphasizing on servicing, enhancing and developing specialized treatment centers, has attracted patients from center, south and east of the country as well as Middle East and Central Asia countries. The dominant approach in this study is developmental – practical and also the research method is descriptive, analytical and survey. In order to analyzing the data, the SWOT model and best-worst techniques have been used. In the following, after identifying strategic position of Yazd province in terms of medical tourism industry, the related strategies were formulated and practical results were presented.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the effects of different strategies including attribute, advantage, application, consumer, competitive advantage, pricing/quality and category on brand promise for products of LG Company in city of Tehran, Iran. The study designs two questionnaires, one for strategic positioning and the other for brand promise in Likert scale. Cronbach alphas for brand promise and strategic positioning are 0.81 and 0.79, respectively. The questionnaires are distributed among 385 randomly selected regular users of LG products and using Spearman correlation as well as Stepwise regression techniques, the effects of various strategies on brand promise are examined. The results of the implementation of Spearman correlation have indicated that there were positive and meaningful relationships between different strategies and brand promise. In addition, the results of Stepwise regression have indicated that three strategies of price/quality, consumer and application were the most important predictors of brand promise.

A flat organization is a firm that has an organizational structure with few or no levels of middle management between employee and executives. The idea is to take advantage of well-trained workers when they are more directly involved in the decision making process, rather than closely supervised by various layers of management. This paper presents an empirical investigation to determine critical success factors on building information technology (IT) based flat organization in a case study of banking industry. Using principal component analysis, the study applies factor analysis for two internal and external factors. In terms of internal factors, there are three factors including Processes and the electronic decision making, Teaching and Electronic Learning and Work in IT. In addition, the study has detected four factors including Electronic Supply, IT structure, Appropriate IT usage and Electronic Communication.

Strategic planning is one of the most popular methods for setting up long-term objectives, which normally deals with various criteria. The Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is a multi-criteria decision analysis method for ranking different alternatives based on various criteria. The method has been widely used among practitioners in different industries. This paper presents an empirical investigation to rank different business development strategies for information technology improvement. The study considers five different strategies including Critical Success Factors Analysis, Business Systems Planning, Porter & apos; s forces model, SWOT analysis, Value chain Analysis and MIN and rank them based on TOPSIS technique. The results of the implementation of TOPSIS has indicated that MIN method is ranked first as the most important factor followed by Business Systems Planning, Porter & apos; s forces model, Value chain Analysis, SWOT and CSF for development of strategic planning for information technology in municipality organization.

This paper performs an investigation to rank different strategies in an engineering firm in Iran. The proposed study designs a questionnaire and distributes it among all experts who worked for a firm in engineering field named Kara Sazeh Matin. The study first determines four key strategies for development of firm’s objectives including improvement in buy/sell system and marketing planning, financial and cost management, human resources management and technology management. The study ranks these attributes based on fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) and technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) in fuzzy format. The results indicate the firm must take over one of the well-known construction firms to develop its operations.

Due to the thrive of family businesses in the current economic situation, to solve the problem of the definition of these businesses, in this paper we suggest using a scale that measures the quality of family influence through three dimensions: power, experience, and culture. The family influence on power, experience and culture (F-PEC) scale, as well as strategic planning, have been tested precisely using a random sample of more than 211 people from two companies of Golestan and Shemshal industrial group located in Tehran, Iran through using the confirmatory factor analysis technique. The Scale shows a high level of reliability. F-PEC has been used in a number of studies to theoretical development, particularly in terms of the impact of family influence on the individual resources and as a source of competitive advantage. In this research, strategic planning is also considered as a source of competitive advantage and its impact on the success of the family business has been investigated.

For years, tangible assets used to be the most important precious wealth of organizations. However, the recent advances in technology has changed this concept and today, intangible assets such as human resources, customers, processes are playing essential roles on making strategies. In this paper, we present a study to setup appropriate strategies using the implementation of balanced score card in four perspectives of customers, processes, learning and financial. The proposed study of this paper gathers important factors through three different brainstorming sessions and prioritize them using TOPSIS method. Based on the results of MCDM technique, selecting appropriate target market for penetration is the number one priority followed by having good accounting system and preparing for more diversified production. These are the most important items influencing strategic planning. Therefore, the study uses BSC for the first two important strategies and discusses possible actions for productivity improvement.

In today’s turbulent and competitive world, strategic planning plays an important role for the
success of firms. Despite the fact that there are literally numerous models proposed for different
companies in various states and structures, the possibility of using strategic planning for
startups has never been seriously considered. In this paper, we present a survey by asking
experts to find out whether strategic planning is suitable for startups. We also propose a model
for strategic planning in startups based on the strategic planning models for small businesses
and entrepreneurship concepts. The model is similar to other models and what differentiates
this models form other approaches is the methodology used for internal and external analysis
and the parameters taken into consideration. The proposed model is examined on an Iranian
food packaging industry for validation. The preliminary results indicate that the success of
startups depends on two sets of parameters: “entrepreneurial opportunities” and “competitive
advantages and entrepreneurial characteristics”.

The new millennium must be called the century to compete for survival. The increase
interaction among international organizations has changed the world into a global village and
firms have no choice but to develop a variety of instruments and equipments to compete with
each other. Value engineering (VE) is one of the new techniques of management science
emerged in using the power of organizational creativity and entrepreneurship programs. VE
modifies the organizational activities, removes the non value-added activities and increases the
current values of organizations. VE has been successfully implemented in many areas of
management such as quality, productivity, project management, etc. The success of a VE
program depends on many organizational factors such as the availability of resources, the
strategy and the organization structure, the senior management support, the organizational
culture and the communication and information systems. In this study, we identify and
prioritize organization factors affecting the implementation of VE using ELECTRE III method.