In the current competitive environment, managers do their best to convert organizations under their supervision into competitive and responsive through creating capability of timely delivery of quality products and services. In the other word, they try to create value for their customers, which yield more profitability for stakeholders. In line with this, determining of inter-organizational factors and the relationships among these variables and supply chain performance plays an important role in achieving these objectives. The relationship modeling is a type of multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem, which requires applying experts to determine the relationships. The Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) is an MCDM tool, which not only can convert the relationships among cause and effect criteria into a visual structural framework, but also it can be used as a technique to handle the inner dependences within a set of criteria. This paper proposes an effective solution based on DEMATEL approach to help managers evaluate the relationships between inter-organizational factors and supply chain performance.

In this paper, we propose an empirical survey between two groups of people who work for two types of governmental organizations asking them whether they prefer to receive their salaries based on their personal characteristics such as job experience, educational background and job performance. The results of our experience indicate that the people who participated in our survey mostly believe that the payment must be performed based on their performance and those who could contribute more must be entitled more in terms of their salaries. The preliminary results of our survey indicate that the payment system must be based on the level of education; work experiences and ob performance. In addition, the people who participate in our survey mostly believe that a transparent policy in payment system helps employees increase their motivation.

This paper presents an empirical study to identify factors influenced on knowledge sharing of employees in organization. With wide literature review in knowledge management, we identify important factors in sharing knowledge including trust, culture, organizational structure, employee & apos; s attitude to share knowledge, and motivation method. The survey is based on a questionnaire consists of 25 items to measure the impact of important factors. Research population is selected from state and private bank & apos; s employees. The preliminary results show that only organizational structure has not significant impact on knowledge sharing.

Nowadays, concerning organizations’ needs as well as emphasis from academia, an increasing endeavor from organizations to design and implement knowledge management projects is evident. However, implementation of any project, particularly in preliminary phases, could render some degree of risk and threat. Thus, it is obvious that failure in recognizing and managing those risks could bring about unsuccessfulness within an organization. In this paper, we have presented an empirical study to find the most important factors influencing knowledge management (KM) implementation in one of industries in Iran. The proposed study designed a questionnaire, distributed among most of the workers, and analyzed the results. The study divided KM implementation in four stages of planning, execution, development and institutional. We have also considered four important factors within each stage. The results indicate that culture was the most important barrier during all four stages. In addition, technology was an important issue during the execution stage while content was important during the development stage.

Entrepreneurs are big potentials for developing economy in any countries. They provide new job opportunities and help economy boost. There are literally many industries, which rely on new these people and they are considered as the primary source of generating new jobs. In this paper, we discuss three entrepreneurship opportunities including universities, technical and vocational centers and women. Universities are able to educate highly skilled people and send them to business and they are able to create new ideas. Technical and vocational centers are, in fact, the best place for training basic or recent advances in technological skills through short term or long term planning. The survey also indicates that women can be considered as a good source of job creation. In this paper, we review the recent related literature on entrepreneurship opportunities in the world and discuss some of the related issues more specifically in Iran.

One of the primary concerns in designing civil structures such as water storage dams and irrigation and drainage networks is to find economic scale based on possibility of natural incidents such as floods, earthquake, etc. Probable maximum precipitation (PMP) is one of well known methods, which helps design a civil structure, properly. In this paper, we study the maximum one-day precipitation using 17 to 50 years of information in 13 stations located in province of Zanjan, Iran. The proposed study of this paper uses two Hershfield methods, where the first one yields 18.17 to 18.48 for precipitation where the PMP24 was between 170.14 mm and 255.28 mm. The second method reports precipitation between 2.29 and 4.95 while PMP24 was between 62.33 mm and 92.08 mm. In addition, when the out of range data were deleted from the study of the second method, precipitation rates were calculated between 2.29 and 4.31 while PMP24 was between 76.08 mm and 117.28 mm. The preliminary results indicate that the second Hershfield method provide more stable results than the first one.

The study performs an empirical study based on the implementation of ANOVA and LSD tests to measure the impact of stress among people with different job titles and ages in a hydropower unit located in city of Esfahan, Iran. The study performed the survey among all 81 people who were working for customer service section of this company and consisted of two parts, in the first part; we gather all private information such as age, gender, education, job experience, etc. through seven important questions. In the second part of the survey, there were 66 questions, which included all the relevant factors impacting employees & apos; stress. Cronbach alpha was calculated as 0.946, which is well above the minimum acceptable level. The implementation of ANOVA and LSD tests have revealed that there are no meaning differences among people with different job titles but people in different age groups maintained various level of stress.

Leadership plays an important role among five main components of management. These days, many organizations try 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 conflict management. The proposed study of this paper performs an empirical study to find the relationship between relationship-oriented leadership style and solution-oriented strategy as well as between leadership style and conflict management. The proposed study distributed a questionnaire among 43 managers who were in different industries in west part of Iran. Most of the people who participated in our survey were male and they were between 25 to 30 years old. The study considers relationship between leadership style and conflict management, which includes the relationship between relationship-oriented and task-oriented leaderships with avoiding conflict management strategy, solution and control based conflict managements. The results confirmed that there is only a meaningful relationship between relationship-oriented leadership with solution-based conflict management. In other words, our survey indicates that when there is a conflict, management can handle the problem using his/her relationship and find appropriate solution to resolve any possible conflict.

In the global competitiveness and growing market environment, “Actual competition is not between firms against firm, than supplier against supplier”. Globally in the fastest market development world gets closer and closer. Consumers prefer fast delivery, economical product, excellent service and high quality product with desired service level. For successful management of this supply chain, supplier considered as the base source for all processes. Therefore, an efficient supplier selection and evaluation process needs to be incorporate. The main purpose of this paper is to provide an extensive state-of-the-art literature review and critique of the studies related to various aspects of supplier selection problem over the past two decades. Research papers appearing in the reputed and leading international journals from 1991 to 2011 are gathered and analyzed. Primary focus is given on more than 200 published and unpublished works. It has been referred extensively to carry out state-of-the-art review for supplier selection problem. Finally, paper provides future perspective based on current research trends available in the published literature.

An organization has to make the right decisions in time depending on demand information to enhance the commercial competitive advantage in a constantly fluctuating business environment. Therefore, estimating the demand quantity for the next period most likely appears to be crucial. Manufacturing companies consider forecasting a crucial process for effectively guiding several activities, and research has devoted particular attention to this issue. The objective of the paper is to propose a new forecasting mechanism which is modeled by integrating Fuzzy Delhi Method (FDM) with Artificial Neural Network (ANN) techniques to manage the demand with incomplete information. Artificial neural networks has been applied as it is capable to model complex, nonlinear processes without having to assume the form of the relationship between input and output variables. The effectiveness of the proposed approach to the demand forecasting issue is demonstrated for a 20/25 MVA Distribution Transformer from Energypac Engineering Limited, a leading power engineering company of Bangladesh.