In today’s global scenario of intense competition and environmental uncertainty flexibility in supply chain has an important role to play for the existence of any supply chain business. A need to be responsive to the constantly changing market scenario and cater to the customer needs, a certain degree of flexibility is required, which requires the coordination of many plants to produce and deliver goods to customers located in different places, and suppliers, which provide each plant with the required components. This paper intends to measure the degree of flexibility required for a two stage supply chain and assessing both the supplier flexibility and the assembler flexibility. In this paper, nine configurations of the SC are considered resulting from the combination of the three degrees of supplier and manufacturer flexibility, i.e. no flexibility, limited flexibility and total flexibility, respectively. Simulation model representing the different flexibility configurations are evaluated and the performance of each configuration analyzed to determine the flexibility configuration suitable to a supply chain. In particular the performance analysis of lead time, work-in-process, service level and cost are measured to determine the suitable flexibility.

During the past few years, many banks try to move from traditional banking system to entrepreneurial one to create new opportunities as well as changing the conditions to deal with the environmental threats. Therefore, recognizing the entrepreneurial orientation and the factors influencing plays an important role for amplifying the innovation and preparing the conditions for the banks to enter the risking process of entrepreneurship. The purpose of this article is to propose a model for entrepreneurial orientation, which can be used by policymakers and managers of banking system towards improving the entrepreneurial orientation. This paper performs a survey among 700 employees of private banks in Tehran, Iran. To collect the required data, the questionnaire was distributed randomly among 350 staffs of these banks and 184 were found to be useful to process. The results show that the entrepreneurial orientation, cultural factors and among organizations factors, making proper connections between organizational unit and high manager support had a good condition. Moreover, organizational conflicts, inappropriate rewarding system, economical and political conditions and the values were not considered as positive adjustment. Thus, the proposed model, as an aborigine pattern, can be used by policy makers and high managers of Iran’s banking system to provide the necessary conditions to enter the entrepreneurial process in the banking system.

In this paper, we study the effects of no-interest activities on return of some Iranian banks over the period of 2006-2011 using Pearson correlation as well as regression analysis. The paper uses two independent variables where the first one is obtained as a difference between other no-interest incomes with commission fee and the second one is the commission fee income. There are three dependent variables including return on investment, return of assets and risk, leading us to setup three regressions analysis. The result of our survey indicates that no-interest based activities have meaningful effects on the performances of banks. In addition, there are some meaningful relationships among interest free activities, which are mostly in terms of negative relations.

This paper investigates corporate governance and ownership effects on earning quality in Iranian private banks. The study uses the information of 12 private banks from year 2005 to 2010 using regression analysis based on panel data. Among different factors, the effect of big five shareholder are considered to be significant and positive on earning quality. In addition, the effect of one variable regression test reveals that institutional ownership has positive impact on earning quality. However, the impacts of other variables including percentage of ownership concentration, the size of board of directors, reliance on debt, logarithm of sum of assets, return of assets, logarithm of operating cash flow on earning quality are not meaningful. The result of this survey indicates that institutional ownership plays an important role earning quality simply because institutions normally have the access on professionals to control management.

This study evaluates the impact of human resource competencies on productivity. The proposed study considers different issues such as different competencies associated with human resources, how we can persuade and strengthen such competencies in organizations and whether human resource competencies impact organizational productivity or not. There are one main hypothesis six minor hypotheses in this study. The proposed study uses descriptive and regression technique to perform the study. The population of this study includes all managers who work for an Iranian petroleum company. This result of this survey shows that that human resource competencies impact organizational productivity. In addition, all dimensions of human resource competencies had significant relationship on organizational productivity.

In this paper, we present an empirical survey on selected Iranian banks operating actively from 2005 to 2010. The proposed study considers the impacts of four important factors including degree of financial leverage, bank size, working capital and liquidity on return on asset as a primary source of measuring profitability of Iranian banking system. The survey uses Pearson correlation test along with simple and multi regression analysis to study the behavior of these four factors on profitability of banking system. Based on the results of this survey, a high level of working capital and financial leverage will result to lower profitability in Iranian private banks.

In this paper, we present an empirical study to detect important factors influencing the success of entrepreneurs who were active in food industry in Tehran, Iran. The proposed study selects a sample of 174 people out of 318 entrepreneurs who were involved in this industry and distributed a questionnaire, which consists of two groups of questions among them. The first group of questions is associated with personal characteristics of the survey people and the second group of questions are related to different financial, infrastructure and supply chain management categories. The study defines entrepreneurs & apos; mental desirability of success in terms of 15 different questions and asks them to provide their insights in terms of five Likert based responses. The results of questions are analyzed using Pearson correlation test and the preliminary results indicate that, among personal characteristics, education and age play important roles on the success of a business plan. The other observation is that the easier entrepreneurs can get loans and financial support, the higher abilities to absorb new customers and the higher chance of success for absorbing new financial resources. Distributions of sales, compared with competing products as well as distribution of after sales service for customers are negatively associated with infrastructures. The rate of success in using new technologies and supply chain management are correlated, which means the better supply chain, the better achievement to information technology.

These days, it is not possible to accomplish tasks without having productive relationships with the rest of the world. Although there are some evidences, which indicate informal organizations normally face some limitations on their return but there are also some studies suggesting that informal organizations are the best ways for making significant changes. Recently, many people have suggested that informal organizations provide good infrastructures for organization & apos; s workflow many conflict of interests could be solved using informal communications. News can be distributed in organizations through informal units much easier and it is easier to handle them. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between informal communications with leadership style in some of governmental organizations located in free islands of Chabahar, in south east part of Iran. The proposed model of this paper designs a questionnaire and distributes it among many people who are acting as managers in those firms. The preliminary results indicate that there is a positive and meaningful relationship between leadership style and informal relationships.

In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to measure the relative efficiency of seven health care centers in province of Semnan, Iran, which were under the coverage of social security organization of Iran. The proposed model of this paper uses a hybrid of balanced score card and data envelopment analysis for performance measurement. The proposed sudy uses four perspectives of balanced score card including learning and growth, internal process, customer and financial perspectives and within each perspective, data envelopment analysis is adopted so that the outputs of each perspective are used as inputs of the other perspective. The preliminary results indicate that all seven units perform relatively well and the overall efficiency of all units in this province is 0.769.

The rapid technological changes in recent decades have created tremendous motivations among entrepreneurs to offer value added products and services. The complicated relationships between technology and innovation have caused to create the innovation management. Therefore, the key prominence of innovation in global village is to design new plans to manage and improve the innovation so that they could continue aiming at their superior national-organizational goals along with their growth and improvement path within their strategic plans. Many countries are interested in comparing themselves with other societies for enhancing their entrepreneurial awareness in an approximate rate and exploit their successful and positively affecting on development of the entrepreneurship innovation-management experiences and policies. In this research, the impact of each determinant of innovation management influencing on entrepreneurial activities in Iran and the members of Global Entrepreneurship Monitor between 2008 and 2011 is studied and evaluated using the structural equations.