During the last decades, the importance of small firms as one of the main economical parts in each country has been proved. Considering to the resources limitation in one hand, and the competitive global market in the other hand, it is very important that firms can obtain sustainable competitive advantages (SCAs) to compete with other rivals. This paper, at the first step, tries to explore the potentially SCAs of Qom & apos; s small firms by using of Structural Equation Model (SEM). Then, the real current situation of firms in using these competitive advantages has been examined. The results tell that except firms & apos; location, other potentially SCAs do not have acceptable condition.

Intellectual capital is a type of asset measuring ability of economic agency in order tomake wealth. These assets do not have physical and objective nature and are intangible assets being achieved through utilization of relative assets with human resources, organizational operation and foreign relations from economic agency. Measuring this issue is important from intra-organizational and extra-organizational views. In this paper, we present survey based on Fuzzy TOPSIS to find important factors influencing intellectual capital management. The proposed model of this paper considers different factors, which exist in the literature and prioritize them based on different criteria. The results of our survey identified seven items as the most influencing factors.

One of the key challenges of nurse scheduling problem (NSP) is the number of constraints placed on preparing the timetable, both from the regulatory requirements as well as the patients’ demand for the appropriate nursing care specialists. In addition, the preferences of the nursing staffs related to their work schedules add another dimension of complexity. Most solutions proposed for solving nurse scheduling involve the use of mathematical programming and generally considers only the hard constraints. However, the psychological needs of the nurses are ignored and this resulted in subsequent interventions by the nursing staffs to remedy any deficiency and often results in last minute changes to the schedule. In this paper, we present a staff preference optimization framework solved with a greedy double swap heuristic. The heuristic yields good performance in speed at solving the problem. The heuristic is simple and we will demonstrate its performance by implementing it on open source spreadsheet software.

In this paper, we consider job shop scheduling and machine location problem, simultaneously. Processing, transportation, and setup times are defined as deterministic parameters. The purpose of this paper is to determine machine location and job scheduling such that the make span and transportation cost is minimized. Therefore, the proposed model is a multi-objective problem one, where the first objective function minimizes make span and another minimizes the transportation cost. To solve the multi-objective problem, two methods are evaluated. Considering combination of job shop scheduling problem and machine location problem makes the proposed model more complex than job shop scheduling problem, which is an NP-hard problem. Therefore, to solve the proposed model, genetic algorithm as a meta-heuristic algorithm is implemented. To show the efficiency of the proposed genetic algorithm, 6×6 job shop scheduling problems are considered.

Ecotourism is one of the most popular methods in green economy and it can generate wealth and develop the economy of developing countries. Ecotourism supports environmental conservation, creates economic opportunities by emphasizing on benefits of the local community, and suggests that the involvement of the residents plays important role for the efficient management of tourism. In this paper, we present an empirical study to measure the impact of ecotourism on developing the economy of a historical place located in south west of Iran called Seydan. The proposed study distributes some questionnaires among 400 randomly selected people who participate in our survey. The results confirm that ecotourism can contribute the economy of the region, significantly. We also perform a comprehensive strategic planning to find out more about strength, weakness, treats and opportunities surrounding the region.

Management of energy plays an important role on having sustainable growth on the economy of developing countries. Electricity is part of the main infrastructure of any country, it can help develop many industries, and any shortage in electricity can jeopardize many heavy industries. In Iran, for many years electricity used to be subsided by the government hoping that economy grows faster but this caused a major problem for this industry since the electricity industry could not handle its expenses and faced with somewhat irreversible crises. In this paper, we present a system dynamic investigation to study the existing crises in this sector. The preliminary result of the implementation of system dynamic is that the sector needs to increase its productivity, significantly and lowers the cost of product.

Performance-based budgeting (PBB) is the latest attempt to use performance indicators in allocation of resources in public sector. PBB experts normally attempt to place emphasis on output and outcome instead of input. Iran has made efforts to establish the PBB system but so far this goal has not been realized. The methodology of the research is descriptive by the means of survey-analytical approach. In the research, the possibility of establishment of PBB in Iran is examined from three perspectives (Policymaking, Implementing, and Monitoring). The conceptual model of this research is formed with a comprehensive review of literature of PBB all over the world. At first, with an extensive review of literature in the countries who implemented PBB or trying to implement it, we identify all variables, which are necessary for a suitable Performance Budgeting model. Then the PBB experts test the necessity of these variables in Iran and finally the existence has been proved by the statistical methods with the Iranian model.

The recent global developments followed by altered attitudes have improved women’s contribution to small and medium enterprises. However, women’s employment in Iranian SME is not in a good condition. In fact, attitude of society towards women together with socio-cultural environments have resulted in reduced rate of women’s employment in developing companies. However, for changing these attitudes the relevant layout should be created anyway. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to enumerate factors affecting women’s employment in Tehran SME from those women’s views. In this regard, we applied Lerner & apos; s model which is more comprehensive than the other similar models. The analysis was carried out through distribution of some questionnaires among a statistical population including 384 women living in the city of Tehran. After data analysis and hypothesis testing, it was concluded that economic elements (as an environmental factor), achievement requirement (as an individual factor) and encouragement (as an organizational factors) respectively affect women’s employment.

With ever increasing demand for manufactured products of hard alloys and metals with high surface finish and complex shape geometry, more interest is now being paid to non-traditional machining (NTM) processes, where energy in its direct form is used to remove material from workpiece surface. Compared to conventional machining processes, NTM processes possess almost unlimited capabilities and there is a strong believe that use of NTM processes would go on increasing in diverse range of applications. Presence of a large number of NTM processes along with complex characteristics and capabilities, and lack of experts in NTM process selection domain compel for development of a structured approach for NTM process selection for a given machining application. Past researchers have already attempted to solve NTM process selection problems using various complex mathematical approaches which often require a profound knowledge in mathematics/artificial intelligence from the part of process engineers. In this paper, four NTM process selection problems are solved using an integrated PROMETHEE (preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluation) and GAIA (geometrical analysis for interactive aid) method which would act as a visual decision aid to the process engineers. The observed results are quite satisfactory and exactly match with the expected solutions.

This paper presents the development of an instrument for measuring strategic control systems (SCS). Although SCS has received considerable attention in the literature, most of the discussions, on the elements that constitute SCS, are limited to descriptive statements. Thus, the theoretical construct of SCS suffers from lack of extensive statistical validation procedures. However, there are a few authors that had initiated the development of an instrument to measure the SCS. Their small effort had also been criticized due to the inconsistency among authors in defining SCS, which would likely affect the validity of the instrument being developed. Given this lacuna, this paper has developed and validated an instrument for conceptualizing SCS, specifically under the environment of Quality Management strategy. Based on a careful and systematic process of instrument development, this paper revealed that SCS consists of two important dimensions, namely strategy implementation and strategic resource allocation. In developing this instrument, a total number of 205 respondents were involved. The findings reported in this paper would benefit future researchers in measuring SCS, particularly for survey-based research.