This paper presents an empirical investigation to determine the efficient locations of bank branch as well as automated banking machine. The study develops a mathematical model to minimize the cost of facility establishment subject to some constraints, which are associated with the population, accessibility of facilities, etc. All input parameters are considered in terms of triangular fuzzy numbers and using some methods, they numbers are converted into crisp values. The method has been applied for four cities in province of Seman, Iran and using WinQSB, the efficient locations of the facilities for a private bank named Samen have been determined.

This paper performs a survey to measure the performance of an administration unit in Iran based on a popular technique of balance scorecard. The study also uses Kano model to prioritize various factors and to provide necessary recommendation to improve the performance of different units. The survey has indicated that while these offices do well in terms of financial figures as well as customer perspective, they perform poorly in terms of learning and growth. According to our survey, it is essential to use information technology in general service offices, properly. In addition, these administrative agencies need to use hardware and software packages, more efficiently and these two basic items have received much attraction.

One of the primary concerns to market a product is to find appropriate channel to target customers. The recent advances on information technology have created new products with tremendous opportunities. This paper presents a mixed integer programming technique based on McCarthy & apos; s 4PS to locate suitable billboards for marketing newly introduced IPHONE product. The paper considers two types of information including age and income and tries to find the best places such that potential consumers aged 25-35 with high income visit the billboards and the cost of advertisement is minimized. The model is formulated in terms of mixed integer programming and it has been applied for potential customers who live in city of Tabriz, Iran. Using a typical software package, the model detects appropriate places in various parts of the city.

During the past few decades, many organizations have attempted to reduce their costs through outsourcing of non-value added activities. This paper presents an empirical investigation to find important factors on reducing production expenses through outsourcing activities. The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire in Likert scale consists of 19 questions and distributes it among some experts. Using structural equation modeling, the study investigates different variables and the results indicate that outsourcing could reduce the production cost through time, inventory and human resources. The implementation of Freedman for ranking these factors indicate that time played the most influential factor followed by inventory and human resources. The results of structural equation modeling indicate that there are some positive and meaningful relationship between human capital and cost (B=0.78, t-value = 9.38), a positive and meaningful relationship between inventory and cost (B=0.81, t-value=10.54) and a positive and meaningful relationship between time and cost (B=0.89, t-value = 11.26).

This paper presents a study to investigate the effect of world’s financial turmoil on performance of petrochemical firms listed on Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE). The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among 87 selected people from 250 existing experts who were active in TSE. The study considers four groups of questions associated with liquidity ratios, operating ratios, leverage and profitability ratios. The questions consider whether financial turmoil has influenced on these four groups of financial ratios or not and the results have been verified using t-student test. According to our survey, although financial turmoil does not seem to have any important impact on operating ratios in this sector, the chaos has influenced on other three financial ratios including liquidity, leverage and profitability ratios.

One of the primary concerns in banking industry is to measure the relative importance of banking industry using popular multi criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques such as data envelopment analysis (DEA) and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). In this paper, we use these two MCDM techniques to measure the relative efficiencies of 16 private and governmental banks in terms of electronic payment. There are three inputs with DEA methods including the number of issued cards, the number of ATM machines and the number of POSs and there are two outputs including the number of successful ATMs and the number of successful POSs transactions. The proposed study of this paper uses the necessary data of one of Iranian provinces and the results of the implementation of DEA and TOPSIS have indicated that 9 out of 16 banks were efficient. Our study also indicates that mean of relative efficiency for private banks was 82% while this number was 75% for governmental banks.