A hybrid batch fabrication plan involving an outsourcing option is often established to deal with the in-house capacity constraint and/or meet timely demand with a reduced cycle time. Besides, the occurrences of unpredictable equipment malfunction and imperfect product quality should also be effectively managed during in-house fabrication to meet the production schedule and the required quality level. To address these concerns, we examine a hybrid economic production quantity (EPQ) problem with an unreliable machine and quality reassurance; wherein, an outside provider helps supply a portion of the batch at a requested timing and desirable quality, but at the price of a higher than in-house unit cost. Corrective action is performed immediately when a Poisson-distributed breakdown occurs. Once the equipment repairing task completes, the interrupted lot’s fabrication resumes. Random nonconforming products are identified, and the re-workable items among them are separated from the scraps. A rework task follows the regular process in each cycle at an extra cost. A portion of reworked items fails and are scrapped. A model portraying the problem’s characteristics is built, and an optimization methodology is utilized to find the optimal runtime solution to the problem. A numerical example reveals our result’s applicability, and specific managerial implications are suggested.

The importance of information in achieving different organizational goals cannot be overstated since it ensures the rapid distribution of resources required to achieve desirable goals. The banking industry’s environment is incredibly dynamic and undergoes quick changes because of creativity, innovation, technological advancements, altered perceptions, and customer expectations. The center of the change curve is information and communication technology (ICT). Business organizations, particularly those in the banking sector, operate in a complex and competitive environment defined by shifting conditions and a volatile economic climate. Data for 20 MENA countries has been collected from the World Bank database between 1997 and 2021. Two-step System (Generalized Method of Moments) GMM were used to evaluate the influence of intrinsic features of individuals in a panel data set and avoid bias caused by omitted variables. The impact of the relationship between banks' performance and their use of ICT was evaluated in this study. The data analysis revealed that the impact of ICT on bank performance in MENA is positive. This suggests that a little shift in the banking industry's investment and adoption of ICT will result in a corresponding rise in profit levels.

In service firms, customer orientation and service innovativeness are the important strategic features to pledge sustainable wealth and growth for financial performance. Focusing on customer means, companies must have rigorous knowledge and understanding of customer needs, expectations, and demands. To satisfy those demands and expectations, new products and/or services need to be carefully designed. Customer orientation involves the introduction of something new or different in response to market conditions and can be perceived as an important driver for innovation. The literature on innovation in services demonstrates that this territory is still under-investigated. Our study is an attempt to slightly complement this shortcoming by empirically solving several issues related to service firms. In particular, we propose the service innovativeness as a mediating effect in the relationship between customer orientation and financial performance. A theoretical research model was investigated via structural equation modeling (SEM) using 686 survey responses from the service industry. The findings of the structural equation model indicated that customer orientation is positively related to financial performance and service innovativeness respectively. And service innovativeness was found as a partial mediating effect, which means that the service innovativeness intervenes for some part but not all of the relationships between customer orientation and financial performance.

This work was designed to study the effect of major drains, such as El Rahawy, on the Nile's water quality over time. The data in this study includes six years of physical and chemical variables data, starting from 2015 to 2020, covering three different water streams. The present results showed that the Rosetta branch and Khandaq sharky canal were directly affected by the agricultural drainage of the Rahway drain, with the change over time for the worse. Rayah El Nasery canal enjoyed complete independence from the negative impact of the drain while maintaining the quality at an appropriate level over time. The study predicts a decline in the water quality of the Rosetta branch in the future and recommends exerting more efforts to treat all pollutants that are discharged on the Nile and raise the efficiency of the Rahawy drain.

This study updates Humanitarian Logistics Digital Business Ecosystem framework coupled with the development of a proposed integrated CCSD-CoCoSo MCDM method to rank factors used in assessing humanitarian and business logistics actor’s propensity to use, diffuse, and adopt a collaborative digital business ecosystem platform for their future operational use. Employing nine criteria derived from technology innovation theories and institutional theory, and 28 experts comprising our decision matrix. The findings report perceived relative advantage, perceived safety and security, and infrastructure and expertise as the top three vital criteria that experts believe when addressed in an ecosystem platform for humanitarian and business logistics actors it would encourage a collaboration for their sustainable future operations. With organisational culture and structure as the least prioritised criteria. The study concludes that the CCSD-CoCoSo obtained results are objective, validating, and that this model is useful and suitable for MCDM analysis and policy making.

The Nile River is an important natural and exclusive source of fresh water in Egypt. Water samples were taken monthly from twelve sites from 2015 to 2020 in El Beheira Governorate and eighteen physicochemical parameters were measured. The results show that the Rahawy drain recorded the highest values for most of the physicochemical parameters. The HPI and MI indicators in Rahawy drain were higher (70 % & 100 %) than in other sites, especially in the summer and winter seasons. The Rahawy WQI values were classified as poor quality. The IWQI results indicate that the water quality for the Rahawy was within the "severe restriction" class, with many restrictions to be used in agriculture. The water quality of the Nile River in the south of Egypt is better than that of the north and the water quality recovery takes more time and distance.

The aim of this research is to investigate the influence of sales managers’ aggressiveness on ethical sales leadership and salesperson performance in B2B context, taking into consideration the sequential mediation of emotional labor and adaptive selling behavior. Sales managers spend most of their time in solving salesforce-related issues, while empirical studies have largely neglected such factors that can have negative consequences on salesforce-related tasks. In order to overcome this gap in the literature, we draw from conservation of resources (COR) theory to introduce and establish an advanced theoretical paradigm. The authors tested the model through 336 responses from B2B salesperson-manager dyads. The findings of the study reveal that sales managers’ aggressiveness has a negative association with ethical sales leadership. Also, sales managers’ aggressiveness is positively related to emotional exhaustion and negatively related to salesperson performance. Consequently, we found significant serial mediation of ethical sales leadership and adaptive selling behavior between the relationship of sales managers’ aggressiveness and salesperson performance. In last, manager decisiveness is playing as a significant moderator in the study. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are also discussed.

This study develops a postponement model for the multi-item replenishment decision featuring commonality, an overtime strategy, and product quality reassurance. A single machine is used to meet the steady demand for multiple products wherein product commonality exists among these end products. The proposed postponement model assumes that all pertinent common parts are fabricated in Stage 1 and the finished products are sequentially fabricated in Stage 2. Random nonconformance rates are associated with both fabrication stages, the repairable nonconforming common parts are separated from scrap, and reworking in each cycle helps ensure product quality for each completed batch. An overtime strategy is used to reduce the lengthy fabrication and rework times for common parts. Mathematical analyses and derivation allow us to obtain the total system costs. The optimization method helps find the optimal replenishment decision. We provide a numerical illustration to show (1) how our model works; (2) the individual impact of the system features (e.g., the overtime factor, commonality in terms of the common part completion rate and its relative value, and the issues pertaining to scrap/rework) on the optimal decision, utilization, and the total system cost; and (3) the collective influence of system features on the highlighted problem. This proposed decision-support model helps production managers achieve the operating goals of lowering total system expenses and cutting the length of the production cycle.

Workload control theory seeks to align capacity and demand to improve delivery performance. However, workload control researchers mainly focused on input control, which regulates the input of work to the production system, thereby neglecting output control, which uses capacity adjustments to regulate the outflow of the work. Moreover, few existing studies on output control investigate a temporarily increase in capacity. This paper introduces a new search direction for output control which does not require an increase in capacity – labour flexibility. Idle operators can move from their workstation to another, thus temporarily increasing the output of that workstation without extra capacity. Using simulation of a five workstations flow shop line, we highlight the positive performance effect of labour flexibility. However, this comes at the cost of high labour movement. Introducing a load-based constraint on when workers are allowed to significantly reduces labour movement, while realizing most of the performance improvement observed for unconstrained labour movement. This has important implications for future research and practice.

Most job shops in practice are constrained by both machine and labor availability. Worker assignment in these so-called Dual Resource Constrained (DRC) job shops is typically solved in the literature via the use of meta-heuristics, i.e. “when” and “where” rules, or heuristic assignment rules. While the former does not necessarily lead to optimal results, the latter suffers from high computational time and complexity, especially when there is a large number of workstations. This paper uses game theory to propose a new worker assignment rule for DRC job shops. The Gale-Shapley model (also known as the stable marriage problem) forms a ‘couple’ made up of a worker and machine following a periodic review strategy. Simulation is used to evaluate and compare the proposed model to “when” and “where” rules previously proposed in the literature. Simulation experiments under different conditions demonstrate that the Gale-Shapley model provides better results for worker assignments in complex DRC systems, particularly when the workers have different efficiency levels. The implications of the findings for research and practice are outlined.