Year:2013 | Volume:8 | Issue:24|Papers Count:11

This study aims to present a holistic approach regarding evaluation of knowledge management (KM) practices on organizational performance of  the subsidiary firms of Iran National Petrochemical Company (INPC). In this study balanced scorecard approach (BSC) has been employed and the research hypotheses were raised based on the four perspectives of this approach, namely customer, growth and learning, internal processes, and financial. By literature, critical success factors (CSFs) of KM and organizational performance along with their items were identified in the framework of BSC’s perspectives. Based on these constructs and their items an instrument was designed and distributed among managers and employees of the surveyed organizations. Reliability of the instrument was calculated by Chronbach’s alpha for the two sections of the instrument i.e. KM practices and organizational performance. Also, using factor analysis the construct validity of the questionnaire was approved. Finally, based on the hypotheses of the study and using structural equation modeling the impacts of KM practices on organizational performance were investigated. The results revealed that KM practices positively and significantly (though weak) impact overall organizational performance .This impact is significant only regarding growth and learning dimension and on the other dimensions is insignificant. Also, as customer and financial constructs were loaded on one factor based on the entity of their indicators we considered these two constructs as stakeholders construct.

In a production collection, nowadays the Performance Measurement of an organization has an important role in achieving to their efficiency and effectiveness on order to competing in current dynamic environment. In this view, the key indicators of the integrated dynamic performance measurement in a competitive environment are considered as a necessary and unavoidable case. In this paper, considering the affective indicators of dynamic Performance to approach BSC in industry, we focus on the problem that how we can provide a mathematical and hierarchical affective model so that it has sufficient answers in the conditions of uncertainty in the fuzzy technics of AHP and TOPSIS; its aim is to recognizing and prioritize the affective indicators related to dynamic performance evaluation on the base of BSC with approach F.MADM in order to prioritizing a set of dynamic indicators to increasing competitive power in industry. In order to determining the indicators, hierarchical tree of deceiving compiled during the sessions with the organization's experts. The statistical sample of the research includes experts and directors of strategic area. Since this indicators used to prioritizing the decision tree indicators are considered as vocal variables, collecting the data is performed by questionnaire in the fuzzy way; so the multiple attribute decision making are fuzzy. The paper is an applied one and in the form of descriptive-measurable researches and it has a field importance; the solving approach of problems is in the type of mathematical modeling and the hierarchy of decision making of some group indicators is fuzzy. The results of analyzing the prioritizing of the factors and their grading by the two technics show that the indicator of expense, delivery time and quality can help to programmers a directors of the organization in order to making long term decisions for competition. There are also positive and strong coordination between the results of validity of the answers of the two technics for dynamic performance evaluation of six alternative. The fuzzy logic is used in order to designing a way increasing the measurement of the occurrence of each performance indicator and the validity of the evaluation and programming process is performed in the content of EXCEL.

In this research, we investigate the efficiency of companies listed on Tehran stock exchange using Data envelopment analysis (DEA). To do so, we compute the relative efficiency of the companies using input oriented CCR, BCC and CRS and VRS approaches and separate their inefficiency into two technical and scale sections. In continuous, we tend to determine the companies with the absolute efficiency among the companies with one hundred percent relative efficiency. Finally, we try to determine the reference groups as a pattern for improving their efficiency by identifying the weakly efficient companies. The research data were collected from financial statement of 75 companies listed in three different industries including chemical, food and non-metal in the Tehran stock exchange from 2006 to 2010. By considering the previous researches, in order to compute the efficiency of the companies, we use from two input variables including total assets and total liability to total assets ratio and three output variables including EPS, ROA and ROE. The results show that the significant amount of existing inefficiency is because of the scale inefficiency in these companies, while all the efficient companies in these three industries are as the weakly efficiency type and there isn’t any company with the absolute efficiency among them.

The past decade has seen many firms focusing on quality management as an essential activity for improving profit, market share and competitiveness. The goal of this research is to determine the usage amount of quality management principles and activities, and their effects on each other and on performance indicators (personnel performance & operational performance) in Dshtestan cement industries located in the Bushehr province. Statistical population of this research includes all employees in Dshtestan cement industries. The SPSS is used for statistical analysis of gathered data to test the hypotheses, and LISREL software is used for testing the research model of Structural Equation Modeling Technique. Research findings illustrate that between quality management activities, teamwork has the greatest effect on continues improvement. Also close relationships between teamwork and personnel performance, and between customer focus and operational performance are stronger than other relationships. The research results also tell us that some acts must be done to increase team & group participation, and it is necessary to pay attention to internal and external customers -inside of results and goods-to improve performance indicators.

Health area in any country is one of the most important areas and supply chain in this area is of a strategic importance; because of directly the impact of supply chain costs into pharmaceutics costs. On the other hand, the area should be able to respond the society’s pharmaceutical needs with the greatest speed and efficiency and hence pharmaceutical supply chain tracking is quite necessary. So, the criteria such as logistic and manufacturing management, financial ability, technology and knowledge management, marketing ability and organizational competitiveness are attended. In addition, since there are many unpredictable factors in above criteria, there must be a complicate decision making method that takes into account all criteria and factors along with transactions between them. In this research, after reviewing the pharmaceutical supply chain and with attention into the importance of drug tracking the best tracking system among the three well-known systems (traditional system, barcode, RFID) was selected. To do this, an innovative method was developed by the combination of two well-known decision making methods, Choquet Integral and ANP. Meanwhile PROMETHEE method was used to illustrate the outranking graph of the outcomes.

Nowadays attend to opportunities and threats in the industry and commerce and evaluation ability of industries and corporations envisage to existed risks and uncertainty is necessary and management of supply chain risks is very important. Management of risk is process of identifying risks, assessment and scheduled for reduction of adverse effects. Risk assessment is one of the most important parts in risk management and according to the many risks and the need to expend optimize resource in the supply chain is very important. Risk assessment and ranking, determined the superiority of risk based on relevant criteria and offered the opportunity to provide the appropriate response for each risk. In this paper whit present a comprehensive hierarchical model for risk assessment, identification of the main risks of supply chain based on the risk breakdown structure method and determination of measurements criteria, a comprehensive questionnaire was developed based on the relative importance of each risk in the steel supply chain and discuss the Esfahan Steel Company as a case study using taxonomy method as a multi-criteria decision making, is defined. Therefore, the risk associated with procurement and suppliers as the most critical risks identified in the company.

The Open Vehicle Routing Problem (OVRP) is one of the most intensively studied problems in computational mathematics that nowadays and it has been receiving much attention by researchers and scientists. In this Problem, the objective is to define minimized distance traveled of the several vehicles that start to move simultaneously from the depot and visit some customers. It is noted that against to the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP), it is not necessary that vehicles return to the depot after servicing the customers. This paper proposes a meta-heuristic algorithm in which at the first stage, a modified elite ant colony (EAS) is applied for finding a suboptimal solution, and at the second stage, the insert and swap local search algorithms are used for finding better solutions. Computational results on fifteen standard benchmark problem instances show that the proposed algorithm is comparable in terms of solution quality of other meta-heuristic algorithms.

Nowadays, experts believe that production, analyzing, and on time and proper information propagation is one of the principle factors in the project success and an important tool to improve the effect of the decisions in the project organization. Unfortunately, despite the high importance of the construction industry in our country due to its added value, high amount of liquidity, manpower and machines and beside its social effects, using modern tools and approaches in project management is not common. In this article it is trying to evaluate the condition of management information systems in construction projects in a case study in Zanjan city. So first the information management system features and its current condition are being defined and afterwards by using field studies, the ideas of people involved in Zanjan province construction industry are being analyzed and evaluated. In this research according to statistics, using management information systems can prevent a lot of adverse decisions and misuses in projects and can improve the project managements.

Since decision-making is the most important task in organizations, selection of an appropriate & comprehensive methodology to make accurate decisions, is critical. One of the practical techniques of Multi-Criteria Decision-Making is Analytical Network Process (ANP). In this paper, the literature of studies on ANP is reviewed and its different applications are discussed. In other words, we focus on applications of ANP and categorize different researches done in this field to present its wide range of applications. The purpose of the paper is to review ANP researches in service and production centers, business and marketing, knowledge management, natural resources, location allocation, strategy and supplier selection.

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) method, is one  of  the developed method in Engineering Quality which through studying marketing, identifying requirements and commitments of customers and identifying technical and Engineering characteristics, tries to consider that in all processes of development and manufacturing for new product development (NPD), function in direction of increasing marketing share and customer satisfaction one of the important steps in QFD method, determining quantitative amounts of HOQ. Nowadays, regarding the increase of complexity and uncertainty of information, evaluating and decision-making to determine quantity of HOQ as an absolute number is a complex issue. In the previous studies conducted, Fuzzy logic was used for determining numerical quantity of HOQ for the conditions where the decision-maker was faced verbal or vague information. However, since information in the real world is insufficient or incomplete, one can use Grey Numbers in the form of an interval instead of absolute or Fuzzy numbers to determine the credit for each indicator so that, besides avoiding modeling for fuzzy numbers or error-accepting in absolute models, the simplicity of grey numbers is practiced. In present study it is deal with presenting Linear Goal Programming Method in grey conditions. First, because of insufficiency and incompleteness of information in the present field of grey numbers theory, Quality Function Deployment method is used. Also, to determine the relative importance, the weighting in Linear Goal Programming Method based on grey numbers is used, with regard to the results gained from the model, one can claim that the presented model can be used where the Quality Function Deployment Method can give incomplete, vague information. The validity of the proposed method is measured in the form of a case study which investigates the customer satisfaction regarding Iranian olive oil quality.

Supply chain management is coordinating all activities with the activities of a company’s suppliers and customers. Effective supply chain management prefers that suppliers and customers together in a harmonious style, with a free flow of information to share, interact. The rapid flow of information between customers, suppliers, supply centers and transportation systems, Enables companies to develop the supply chain. On the basis of this study has been paid By using structural equation modeling to examine the implementation of information technology on supply chain capabilities and performance of the Saipa company. According to the analysis results, we can say that the IT implementation on supply chain capabilities and performance effects are significant. The significant effect It shows The capabilities and benefits of the implementation of IT in the enterprise can be a source of supply chain performance and functionality. In addition, the IT implemented both directly and indirectly has a positive impact on performance Of course, since it also has a significant relationship. Important consideration is that the indirect impact of IT implementation on performance of channel supply chain capabilities would make sense. In fact, despite the direct supply chain performance does not increase, but the increase is extremely positive effect on the performance of IT implementation.