Industrial Management Journal
Year:2016 | Volume:7 | Issue:4 |Papers Count:10

Maintenance is one of the systems which can play an essential role in the success of manufacturing and services systems. One of the most maintenance innovative approaches is agile maintenance. Based on this approach, organizations integrate maintenance concepts with agility features such as: flexibility, agile and fast move, etc and also are trying to provide one hundred percent preparing equipment. This research aims to consider the literature related to agile maintenance and to provide key and effective factors of agile maintenance in vehicle industry in Iran using a fuzzy Delphi method. This research applies fuzzy DEMATEL method for providing a ranking and relationships between criterion. The results showed that the key and effective factors are as bellow: the quick decisions, the coordination, the capability and infrastructure of IT, the sharing information actively with partners, the quantity and quality of services, the utilization of the appropriate technology, the accurate planning of activities, the planning demand supply, the control maintenance, the top manager commitment, the participatory management style, the virtual organization. The quick decisions and the sharing information actively with partners are the most effective and the most impressible factors as well.

The purpose of this study is to prioritize leagility enablers in food and beverage industries in Qazvin Province with the hybrid method of FLin PreRa-FQFD. In doing so, it directly assessed the impact of leagility enablers on its attributes with fewer pairwise comparisons and yields consistent priority ranking which lead to improvement in decision-making. In this study, after reviewing literature and theoretical background of the leagility, its attributes and enablers are identified and a framework for prioritizing these indicators as well as major competitive advantage is designed. The study was based on 38 companies from the food and beverage industries, in Qazvin province. The findings indicate that competitive advantage "costs" is the most important competitive advantage in this industry. "Customer and market sensitiveness", is the most important attribute based on expert viewpoints. Also among the enablers, "rapid introduction of new products and production cycle time reduction" in achieved the highest weights and priorities.

In today’s competitive market, an agency is successful which by considering the needs of the clients and the capabilities of its staff, presents products and services which both decreases the costs and expenses and is of high value in the eyes of its clients. For reaching these goals, the simultaneous use of product cost management and quality management systems, which are regarded as target costing, as strategic tools for cost management used for planning profit and decreasing costs, is needed. The aim of this study is presenting a framework for determining the target cost, evaluating and sequencing product’s function, with respect to the product’s quality in the client’s point of view. With the use of quality function deployment approach in target costing and integrating it with Fazzy Kano model, expenses can be reduced and client satisfaction can be provided in its highest level. The present research was a case study of one of the products of Pars Khazar company. Finally, the functions of the product for the purpose of improving and reducing expenses were sequenced and presented.

The performance evaluation and efficiency measurement of software companies and compare them together as a set of knowledge-based activities due to the unknown of internal processes and stages common to these companies and ignoring these processes in performance evaluation by data envelopment analysis models and how to consider these processes and procedures for calculating efficiency of each stage and overall efficiency of each company are the issues that this article effort to study them. The main objects of this study are determination the common stages and processes of innovation activities in software companies and measurement of the innovation efficiency of each stages and the overall efficiency of each company over a period of four years. The literature review and experts interviews revealed that each company has two series stages of knowledge production and exploitation processes. To determine the efficiency of each stage and the overall efficiency we used network data envelopment analysis- game theory approach. The modeling is done by the leader-follower method or Stackelberg game for two stages and their solved using GAMS software. The results show that the overall efficiency of all companies is less than one and in the first stage, only two of the 38 companies and in the second stage, only three of them are full efficient. It is suggested that inefficient firms at every stage follow its determined benchmarks to improve their operations.

Different decisions, including location decisions of companies which are operating in international dynamic environment are subject to significant uncertainty. So in this research an international facility location problem under uncertainty is considered and an integrated model for strategic and operational planning is presented. In strategic level countries are assessed according to international economic indices available in Global Competitiveness Report (GCR (and in operational level regarding the obtained values and factors like establishment costs, transportation costs, capacity and demand a multi objective optimization model is developed. The problem includes three objective functions: finding the least number of facilities, locating them in the best possible locations and minimizing transportation costs. A demonstration of the application of the methodology is presented by investigating the location problem of an international pharmaceutical company in Europe.

Sustainable supplier selection in the long term, lead to a competitive advantage in the supply chain. This study aims to present a conceptual model for sustainable supplier selection in the SAIPA supply chain. In first, based on a comprehensive literature review 58 indicators identified to assess the sustainable suppliers. After checking the indicators by automotive industry's supply chain experts, only 17 indicators were verified. Then, the questionnaire distributed among experts in the SAIPA's supply chain, and finally 191 questionnaires was obtained. In next sustainable supplier selection model was estimated by using confirmatory factor analysis and the indicators explained three latent variables (economic, social and environmental). The results achieved by this research model revealed that the sustainable suppliers in order of priority to the aspects of "social", "economic" and "environmental" conditions. The results achieved by this research model revealed that the sustainable suppliers selection explained by "social", "economic" and "environmental" latent variables. Also the priorities of each sub-index was determined in explained “sustainable suppliers selection” model.

Lean cell operates itself by what is called standard operations. Job rotation is known as the standard operation of a lean cell. However, researchers have not studied job rotation to demonstrate the performance of a lean cell. Job rotation decisions affect lean cell performance through influencing the manner in which tasks assigned to the selected operators during several rotation periods. This research studies the lean cell performance as a function of rotation interval, cell factors (size and type) and takt time. The performance targeted in term of 4 different measures. After modeling job rotation scheduling problem and developing an efficient algorithm to find near optimal solutions, data for lean performance against arrangement of factors was gathered by scenarios made based on Taguchi's approach to design of experiments. To analyze the model and impact of factors, ANOVA and MANOVA and interaction analysis were applied. The results shown that the effect of rotation interval and its complex interactions with other factors are statistically significant and some patterns for lean cell performance were obtained.

Supply chain management as a vital challenge to the Cement industry and developing infrastructure as a whole has been posed by scholars. This research is an attempt to investigate LARG supply chain management as a comprehensive approach to consider simultaneously four basic relevant strategies namely Lean, Agile, Resilience and Green. Using a survey methodology and gathering data from twenty one experts in cement industry, every strategy has been weighted by SWARA and VIKOR techniques. Then results were compared utilizing COPRAS- techniques. Finally, the average score was led to conclusion that in the cement industry the most important strategy are resilience, green, agile and lean respectively. At the end a set of useful guidelines were developed and recommended to the managers.

During pre-project planning as an essential phase of a project, fundamental decisions that lead to project success or failure will make. This phase of a project is more important essentially in oil, gas and petrochemical mega projects that tremendous amount of resources should consume. Uncertainty in the initial phases of the project is at the highest level and therefore major project decisions should be made based on the minimum level of information and assurance of future. In this paper, a performance forecasting model for oil industry projects proposed that based on Neuro-fuzzy inference systems and rooted in project progress functions which known as S curve models. In this study types of functions and models that can generate project S curves are investigated and nine most used functions identified. In the next step six performance variables in two main sections include project progress and resource growth recognized and 25 variables in two categories and four clusters using close questionnaire approach identified. Finally a model for project performance prediction based on Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System developed.

This study is done to define the technological contribution in the value chain of chemical industries and assess the effects of this on industrial’s value added. The value network contains 581 active firms in 5 stages and 21 groups, and date gathered with 141 questionnaires by snowball method. Then the technology contribution and economic value added are defined for each stage and group. Besides the descriptive analysis, the role of technology contribution in value creation is evaluated with correlation analysis. The findings show that value added has a positive correlation to the technology contribution and a reduction of technology share in each firm leads to decreasing operating profit decline and increasing non-technological capital cost, and finally the reduction of value added. Assessment of the groups shows that intermediate, petrochemical, coating, insulation and detergents groups have more impression with technology contribution. With respect to the low relative technology contribution of these groups in Fars province, technology reconstruction and modernization investment in these firms could upgrade value chain.