In this paper, a new mathematical model in cellular manufacturing systems (CMSs) has been presented. In order to increase the performance of manufacturing system, the production quantity of parts has been considered as a decision variable, i.e. each part can be produced and outsourced, simultaneously. This extension would be minimized the unused capacity of machines. The exceptional elements (EEs) are taken into account and would be totally outsourced to the external supplier in order to remove intercellular material handling cost. The problem has been formulated as a mixed-integer programming to minimize the sum of manufacturing variable costs under budget, machines capacity and demand constraints. Also, to evaluate advantages of the model, several illustrative numerical examples have been provided to compare the performance of the proposed model with the available classical approaches in the literature.

The purpose of this research is to find out the impact of consumption aspirations and brand knowledge on customer purchase decisions. Data was collected through a questionnaire from 168 customers of fast food sector of Pakistan. Results show that there is a positive association between consumption aspirations, brand knowledge and customer decision making. The Results of the study show that there is a significant association between consumption aspirations, brand knowledge and customer decision making. The fast food sector can get higher level of customer satisfaction and a higher number of customer base and market share through a higher level of brand knowledge and consumption aspiration of the customer. The results of the study show that there is a positive association between consumption aspirations, brand knowledge and customer decision making in the fast food sector of Pakistan.

Architecture includes so many documents where each describes one part of an enterprise. The problem in using such descriptions is on how to consider and use all components. Therefore, in order to organize the descriptions of enterprise architecture, we should use a framework. C4ISR is one of the enterprise architectural frameworks, which includes three views, contains some products. In order to show the products, this framework needs a unified notation, which covers all the products with various views. Unified Modeling Language (UML) prepares such situation. But in order to decrease the expenses of enterprise architectural productions process, the architectural products shall be evaluated before the architectural implementation level happens. In this article, a simple way for validation of enterprise architectural products with Colored Petri Nets is presented to evaluate true behavior of architectural products well.

This paper considers a multi-objective integrated production-distribution problem (IPDP) for multi-product and multi-production facility with limited capacity vehicles over a multi-period horizon in a two-level supply chain. In order to consider uncertainty of a real supply chain, some fuzzy parameters are considered for costumer demands, machine and labor levels of each manufacturer. The proposed model minimizes total production, inventory and distribution costs and total delivery time, simultaneously and the performance of the proposed model is evaluated on several randomly generated instances. The results show that integrating production and distribution decisions is more efficient than making these two decisions, separately.

The primary goal of creating a culture of performance management is to improve processes based on the responsibility of individuals and groups for the continuous improvement of business processes, and to contribute to their skills. In this paper, we discuss all related issues and indentify the most important aspects and components of performance management. The proposed study of this paper is to find out which performance management works best for national Iranian oil products distribution company (NIOPDC). The proposed study uses analytical hierarchy process to prioritize all important factors based on pair-wise comparison. We use geometric mean to find the average of comparisons and all computations are performed using Expert Choice software package. In summary, stakeholders (0.262) are the most important components of our survey followed by employee management (0.247), social responsibility (0.190) comes in the third position and quality of services (0.166) and internal process (0.134) are two less important factors in this survey.

The main target of this study is to consider the effect of the combination of board of directors on the corporate transparency in some companies among selected ones in Tehran Stock Exchange Market over the period of 2007- 2010. In this research, the combination of board of directors is selected among some factors of corporate transparency such as structure of ownership and the rights of owners, financial information and statistics and structure and combination of board of directors and managers as a sub-indicator for corporate governance. Linear regression statistical method is used to test hypotheses of study. The size of ? is considered as 5% and hypotheses are accepted or rejected by means of Durbin-Watson and Clemogrov-Smirnov tests and by comparing p-value with ?. At last, by means of forward regression method, the effect of control variables is considered over each hypothesis. The results show that the members of board of directors have no effect on partnership transparency, but effect on financial data and information and structure and combination of board of directors.

Tourism industry plays an important role on developing economy especially in regions where there are different historical, landscape and other natural attractions. Bavan Valley located in Nur Abad Mamasani city in Iran is one of the well-known places among tourists. The region has outstanding natural landscapes, moderate weather especially in spring and summer, low distance from the major road locating between different local regions such as Fars, Bushehr, Khuzestan, and Kohkiluye Boyer Ahmad Province. These regions provide appropriate accessibility for the citizens of highly populated cities of this province and it plays essential role of a major attractive pole in southern part of the country. The primary objective of this research is to recognize the present barriers for attracting tourists and to analyze the tourists’ satisfactions associated with the facilities and tourist services. The statistical population of this research includes all the tourists of Bavan Valley in which 381 individuals were chosen as the sample of this research, using Cochran & apos; s formula. The results indicate that there is a significant relationship between the absence of advertisement about Bavan Valley and the number of tourists in this zone (P & LT; 0.05). The findings also show that there is a significant relationship between lack of infrastructural equipments and un-development in tourism industry (P & LT; 0.05). Moreover, the findings of SWOT analysis indicates that 9 internal strength versus 10 internal weaknesses and 7 external chance versus 8 external threat were recognized and analyzed with regard to ecotourism in this zone. Thus, generally 16 strength and chances as the advantages and 18 weaknesses and threats as the obstacles about the Bavan Valley’s tourism were recognized in order to develop tourism.

Leadership plays an essential role in managing different organizations. These days, different organizations attempt to resolve any existing conflicts through adapting an appropriate leadership strategy. During the past few years, there are increasing interests in examining the relationship between management style and self-esteem. The proposed study of this paper performs an empirical study to find the relationship between leadership style and self-esteem. The proposed study distributed a questionnaire among 80 managers and 150 regular employees of an organization in Iran. We have used Pearson correlation test, t-student and Freedman tests to verify the relationship between leadership style and self-esteem. The investigation of this survey considers four groups of leadership style including autocratic-charity, autocratic-exploitation, management consulting and participative and their effects on self-esteem. The results of our survey indicate that there is a positive and strong relationship between participative leadership management style and self-esteem. The results also indicate that there is strong relationship between educational background and self-esteem.

In recent years, there are several methods introduced for the improvement of operational performances. Total quality management and supply chain management are two methods recommended for this purpose. These two approaches have been studied in most researches separately, while they have objectives in common, and this makes them a strategic means, which can be used, simultaneously. Total quality management and supply chain management play significant roles to increase the organizational competitiveness power. Moreover, they have only one purpose that is customer satisfaction, and they are different only on their approaches to reach their objectives. In this research, we aim to study both approaches of quality management and supply chain, their positive increasing effects that may be generated after their integration. For this purpose, the concept and definitions of each approach is studied, independently, their similarities and differences are recognized, and finally, the advantages of their integration are introduced.

One of the primary questions in asset management is to find good combinations of different assets and this has been an interesting area of research for over half a century. The proposed model of this paper uses decision makers & apos; feedbacks based on multiple criteria decision making technique to find an appropriate portfolio. We first select some important financial criteria and then using decision makers & apos; opinions and by implementation of some fuzzy network analysis we find appropriate weights of the asset. The proposed model uses two multiple criteria techniques namely TOPSIS and VIKOR and the model is examined for some real-world data from Tehran Stock Exchange. The results of the implementation of the proposed model have been examined against Markowitz traditional model. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed model of this paper performs reasonably well compared with alternative method.