One of the methods to reach continuous improvement on economy is to boost export and target international market. However, there are some limits on available resources, which present most developing countries for improvement of export activities. One way to overcome such trouble is to use foreign direct investment but this may happen only when we could determine major barriers and overcome the challenges. The present study presents an empirical investigation to detect important barriers on foreign direct investment in Iranian industries. The proposed study uses structural equation modeling to detect major barriers for export development. The results of our survey indicate that there were four factors including economic factors, feasibility study, infrastructure for investment and investment resources influencing on foreign direct investment.

Supply chain is a complicated networking of suppliers, manufacturers, warehouses, distributors and end customers. Through this network, we can easily see the flow of raw materials, information and money. In the modern global manufacturing environment, change has become a constant phenomenon. Change occurs due to fluctuation in technology, environmental requirements, regulatory policies, societal needs and the last but economy is the most important thing. Uncertainties in supply and demand, globalization of the market, shorter product life cycle, the increasing use of manufacturing product, fast development of information technology, diversified demand of customer for products distribution and logistics partners are responsible for making more complex supply chain network. Because of all these phenomena emergence of Next–Generation of supply chain management is inevitable. Therefore, in this article we try to incorporate several issues and concerns regarding future supply chain such as natural disasters, problems in outsourcing and import-export issues associated with goods, raw material and several related issues such as taxation, cultural aspects, risk, reliability and last but not the most important one is associated with environmental issues. During the next-generation of supply chain management, the mode of production as well as management is changing from product oriented towards customer’s demand or service oriented. Another salient feature of this paper is to demonstrate how to do the planning and management of the next-generation supply chain so that it would maximize profit in the chain rather than maximizing profit of an organization in isolation.

With the development of faster means of communication, better quality computers and rapid transportation systems, manufacturing is no longer restricted at local level, but has become global in character. As a manufacturing company has to become competitive for its survival, it has to supply products of consistent high quality at reliable and reduced delivery time. Market also demands more product variants that means reduced lot size and high flexibility in operations. Manpower cost has also risen. All these factors tend to increase the product cost. However, the industry has to maintain the cost at a reasonable level. Confronting these challenges, companies world-wide are forced to find ways to reduce costs, improve quality, and meet the ever-changing needs of their customers. One successful solution has been the adoption of Just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing strategy in which many functional areas of a company such as manufacturing, engineering, marketing, purchasing etc. are involved. In this paper, literature review on research works based on JIT was carried out and presented. The introductory section deals with the philosophy of JIT, and the concept involved in Kanban optimization and later this paper reviews literature on optimization Technique in JIT implementation.

During the past few years, there have been growing competition among business owners and they mostly have no choice but to decrease their prices in an attempt to survive on the market. In some cases, suppliers offer goods and services for less than the cost of production to gain more market share. In this paper, we study different factors influencing pricing strategy in food industry. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale consists of 36 questions, distributes it among 311 Iranian experts in food industry and analyzes it based on principal component analysis. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.86 and Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Approx. Chi-Square are 0.72 and 3614, respectively. Based on the results of our survey, we have derived seven factors including supply management, environmental factors, product management, distribution structure, standardization strategies, market leadership and market organization.

Information technology plays an important role on the success of different organizations. In today’s competitive environment, there is a need to reduce the cost of products by increasing productivity and quality of products and services. Bullwhip effect is one of the most important issues influencing production planning reducing the efficiency of production planning by increasing unwanted materials, etc. Bullwhip effect occurs for many reasons such as lack of good demand estimation, poor communication between vendors and suppliers, etc. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation based on DEMATEL technique to find the effect of information technology on reducing the bad consequences of bullwhip effect. The study first uses systems dynamic to build a cause-and- effect relationship between different factors influencing bullwhip effect and then using fuzzy DEMATEL, the effect of information technology on bullwhip effect has been confirmed.

Information plays an important role on having crystal clear image about market. A good awareness about products, vendors, new rivals, etc. always helps us offer better prices and reach better agreements. This paper presents an investigation on the role of industrial market information on the success of negotiations. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale consists of 22 questions, distributes it among 228 Iranian experts and analyzes it based on principal component analysis. During the survey, the numbers of questions are reduced to 17. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.86 and Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Approx. Chi-Square are 0.773 and 745.8, respectively. Based on the results of our survey, we have derived six factors including human resource management, integrated strategy, organizational software packages, communication factors, penetration factors, past perception and assessment process.

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.

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 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.

This paper studies the issue of channel coordination for a decentralized supply chain consisting of one vendor and one buyer in multi-period setting. Considering the allowance of the backorder at the buyer side distinguishes this work in the literature. The credit option contract as an incentive scheme is pursued to encourage the buyer to participate in the coordination model. Order quantity, credit time and backordered demand in each period as decision variables are determined jointly in order to encourage the chain’s member to participate in the coordinating contract. The proposed model shows that the credit option contract for the case of backorder allowance is able to realize the channel coordination in the studied supply chain. A wide range of numerical examples are studied to analyze the sensitivity of the contract efficiency to the inventory system’s parameters such as order cost, holding cost and shortage cost.