Structure analysis plays an important role on increasing the efficiency of banking industry. A change in structure of business in this industry could change the profitability, significantly. The proposed study of this paper aims at structural analysis and comparative advantages for a governmental bank in a province of Semnan, Iran called Melli bank. The proposed study considers the effectiveness of four saving plans including current, loaned with no interest, short and long term based in three periods. It applies the change of location-share model, which includes provincial growth influence, structural growth and competitive growth as the determinant variables in saving rate. Findings indicate the disproportionate growth of saving rate in the Melli bank toward the other banks of the province in every 3 terms of the study. The research results show that short time saving in 2001 and 2004, loaned without interest and short term savings in 2001 and 2008, loaned without interest and long term savings in 2004 and 2008 had negative structural changes which indicate that the combination of discussed saving wasn’t desirable, but other savings benefits of desirable combination.

The idea of Science and Technology parks has been widely used in many countries and many innovative plans are initiated in these places. In this paper, we present a multiple criteria decision making plan to prioritize important factors influencing the success of an innovative plan. The study uses fuzzy triangular numbers to gather decision makers & apos; feedback on different criteria and rank them using fuzzy VIKOR method. The results of our survey indicate that it is important to be the first who introduce the idea, the idea must be important for customers and market and it must be scientifically justified. Among other important criteria, the availability of experts to support the ideas and applicability in the area of human and social science are of important criteria. The plan also does not need to have huge amount of investment and a complicated technology and finally it should come to market in short amount of time.

Just in time is one of the most important components of having efficient production plan. The primary objective of JIT is to reduce the amount of storage as much as possible to remove the cost of inventories and work-in-progress. However, the implementation of JIT is a tedious task especially in developing countries, where there are shortages for essential infrastructures and increase the risk of production in case of JIT adaptation. In this paper, we present a survey to detect important factors preventing JIT implementation in Iran. The proposed study designs a questionnaire for assessing important factors influencing JIT adaptation, which includes inflation, political sanction, unreliable suppliers, shortage of cash flow and weak organizational culture. The results of our survey confirm that shortage of cash flow is the most important factor, follows by economical sanction and inflation.

Integrated supply chain includes different components of order, production and distribution and it plays an important role on reducing the cost of manufacturing system. In this paper, an integrated supply chain in a form of multi-objective decision-making problem is presented. The proposed model of this paper considers different parameters with uncertainty using trapezoid numbers. We first implement a ranking method to covert the fuzzy model into a crisp one and using multi-objective particle swarm optimization, we solve the resulted model. The results are compared with the performance of NSGA-II for some randomly generated problems and the preliminary results indicate that the proposed model of the paper performs better than the alternative method.

Road construction projects are considered as the most important governmental issues since there are normally heavy investments required in such projects. There is also shortage of financial resources in governmental budget, which makes the asset allocation more challenging. One primary step in reducing the cost is to determine different risks associated with execution of such project activities. In this study, we present some important risk factors associated with road construction in two levels for a real-world case study of rail-road industry located between two cities of Esfahan and Deligan. The first group of risk factors includes the probability and the effects for various attributes including cost, time, quality and performance. The second group of risk factors includes socio-economical factors as well as political and managerial aspects. The study finds 21 main risk factors as well as 193 sub risk factors. The factors are ranked using groups decision-making method called linear assignment. The preliminary results indicate that the road construction projects could finish faster with better outcome should we carefully consider risk factors and attempt to reduce their impacts.

The generalized assignment problem (GAP) is a unique extended form of the Knapsack problem, which is tremendously practical in optimization fields. For instance, resource allocation, sequencing, supply chain management, etc. This paper tackles the GAP in uncertain environment in which the assignment costs and capacity of agents are fuzzy numbers. Two models are presented for this problem and a novel hybrid algorithm is offered using simulated annealing (SA) method and max-min fuzzy in order to obtain near optimal solution. Computational experiments validate the efficiency of proposed method.

The study examined the market entry strategies of multinational services companies into Ghana’s service sector and the linkages to firm level performance after entry. Literature was reviewed on market entry strategies, internationalisation, globalisation of service firms and resource-based theory. The study adopted a combination of both quantitative and qualitative research approaches in this study. The qualitative approach was for deeper enquiry and quantitative for empirical testing. The study found that firm specific factors affect the market entry strategy while the entry strategy also affects performance after it enters the market. Home country factors and the features of services are also seen to moderate on the effects mentioned. Respondents also indicated that the features of services were an industry wide issue not so much consideration is given to it.

Kouroush Jenab, Donald Staub, Mark Rajai PDF (233 K)
Abstract: Students at risk of dropping out of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) programs often display signs that indicate they are at risk. A need exists to identify at risk STEM students early and to develop and implement effective intervention strategies that utilize the Total Quality Management (TQM) approach. Most of all, a database system is needed to track this early intervention process, if retention rates are to be improved. To address this need at a small community college in North Carolina, a system was developed and underwent a pilot study in Fall 2009 and Spring 2010. The two pilot groups were compared to the two control groups to identify differences in retention, course credit completion rates, and grade point averages (GPA). The first pilot group displayed no significant differences, while the second pilot group displayed significant differences in most of the areas analyzed in the study, indicating a database system can be used to improve STEM student retention. While the second of the two pilot groups displayed promising results, managerial and logistical issues, such as less than optimal instructor involvement, impeded success were identified. This paper will describe the design, implementation, and the preliminary results of this study and outlines the need for further research that confirms these preliminary findings.

Successful organizations share some identical factors that pave the way for their success. Among these factors, strategic management is the key to success for organizations to contribute more to the competitive world market of today. In this respect, the pivotal role of outsourcing cannot be denied. This research parallelizes the criteria affecting the outsourcing success as presented in Elmuti model with the Balanced score card method in the Tose & apos; e Ta & apos; avon Bank. In this research, questionnaires and interviews with experts helped determine the strategic goals at four perspectives of balanced score card method (at Tose & apos; e Ta & apos; avon Bank) and the relative weights were computed for each of balance score card (BSC) perspectives by using AHP method. As the next step, the indexes were prioritized by applying the quality function development(QFD) technique and considering strategic goals at four perspectives in section "WHAT" and the outsourcing success criteria of Elmuti model in section "HOW". At the end of algorithm, the results are compared with the Elmuti method. Based on the results, the hybrid proposed technique seems to perform better than Elmuti.

Parameter design or robust parameter design (RPD) is a statistical methodology used mostly in engineering fields as a cost-effective approach for improving the quality of products and processes. The primary goal of parameter design is to choose the levels of the control variables, which optimizes a defined quality characteristic. Modeling both the mean and variance is commonly referred to as dual modeling. In parametric dual modeling, estimations of the mean and variance parameters are interrelated. When one or both of the models (the mean or variance model) are mis-specified, parametric dual modeling can lead to faulty inferences. An alternative to parametric dual modeling is nonparametric dual modeling. However, nonparametric techniques often result in estimates characterized by high variability, which leads us to ignore important knowledge. We develop a dual modeling approach called dual model robust regression (DMRR), which is robust against user misspecification of the mean and/or variance models. Numerical and asymptotic results illustrate the advantages of DMRR over several other dual model procedures. The proposed method will be illustrated with simulations.