This paper identifies and analyzes barriers of customer relationship management (CRM) implementation in SMEs. Hence, based on a comprehensive review of the literature and gathering the viewpoint of experts, the influencing barriers are identified. In order to analyze the identified barriers, DEMATEL methodology is applied and a causal model of the relationships between barriers is developed. Furthermore, based on the DEMATEL results the barriers are also categorized into two groups of driver and dependent. The results of study show that inadequate budget, organization culture, obligation of major management to CRM and inadequate access to modern technical knowledge are among effective impediments and play important role in successful establishment of customer relationship management system.

Agile supply chain plays an important role on having efficient production planning. There are different factors affecting the efficiency of a supply chain and the attempt of this paper is to find the most important elements in agile supply chain. The proposed model of this paper gathers decision makers & apos; opinions and based on DEMATEL technique determines the most important items. The preliminary results of this survey indicate that we could divide the factors into four groups and two elements including automation and utilization of technical tools of relations and information play the most important roles among other factors.

The assessment of risks in an audit work could directly influence the costs, timing, and strategies as well as audit quality. The purpose of this paper is to identify the critical affecting factors on risks proposed in Audit Risk Model (ARM), in Iranian audit environment of Iran. In the present, the Delphi Method consists of 60 audit partners and managers is employed. The panel consists of two equally divided groups, one from audit organization, a governmental organization, and the other from private audit firms. We employ two rounds of Delphi and 58 critical risk factors extracted from auditing literature and Iranian auditing standards and present them to the experts. There are 43 factors categorized as important factors to assess the risks in ARM. The results are considerable in an Iranian audit environment, findings show the most important factors are in inherent risk factors. Finally, we made a comparison with a similar study in Taiwan. Differences indicate that in professional judgment issues like risk assessment, the consideration of particular culture and environment could help enhance the precision of assessments, especially in assessing control risk factors.

Spirituality and ethics play important roles in bringing justice for many business units. During the past few years, there has been growing concern on thinking about profitability without considering other aspects such as spirituality. The infamous Enron incident has been a crystal clear of a case of thinking just on short-term profitability without considering other ethical issues. Spirituality helps organizations create ethical values, responsibility and job satisfaction among workers and these issues could increase business competitive advantages. In this paper, we study the impact of spirituality on different levels of individual, workspace and organizational for a real-world case study. The survey results of this paper indicate that spirituality could significantly impact the organization in different levels.

Packaging plays an important role on marketing products and services in many competitive environments. A good packaging can increase sales of products, reduces the level of inventory, which yields to higher profitability. In this paper, we study the relationship between a good packaging program and customer's confidence as well as customer's attraction on purchasing goods and services. The paper uses a questionnaire based on Likert scale and distributes among the target population of this survey and the information of packaging are divided into two groups of visibility and informative. The results indicate that a good label with detailed and precise information on product could significantly impact customer's confidence while other visible information do not have much impact on customer's confidence.

Home appliances are considered as one of low margin and competitive industry in the world. This industry often needs significant amount of investment and resources and it often faces with some challenges during economic crises. In this paper, we present a framework for organizational excellence to detect any possible problems in home appliances industry. The proposed framework of this paper is used for a real-world case study of Iranian home appliances. The results of our survey indicate that there are four major dimensions involved with this industry including facilities, knowledge and skills, environment and vision. There are three criteria associated with facilities with 30 indexes, 14 criteria associated with knowledge and skills with 144 indexes, three criteria involved with environment with 33 indexes and five criteria linked with vision with 53 indexes. Therefore, home appliances in our case study needs 4 dimensions for achieving the organizational excellence.

Advertisement plays an important role on increasing sales and organizations normally spend significant amount of cost in an attempt to increase profitability. A productive advertisement normally involves various factors and we need to determine the most important ones, very carefully. In this paper, we use a questionnaire-based survey to find the most important factors influencing advertisement. In this paper, we focus on gathering information from the advertisement providers to assess each advertisement plan. The proposed study of this paper uses factor analysis to determine 15 most important factors, which include 42 variables.

In this paper, we present an empirical study to determine the effects of different barriers on using information technology for learning and teaching in elementary school students. We plan to find the most important factors preventing elementary school children on implementing different information technology facilities for their educational programs. The study selects a population of 720 women teachers who work for elementary schools and chooses a sample of 220 people for this study. A questionnaire consists of various important factors are distributed among these people and the results are analyzed using some statistical tests. The study indicates that education program itself is to blame as the most important barrier for using information technology.

The dimensions of service quality and their relationship with the behavioral pattern of customers have received immense importance in the banking sector. The relational impact of service quality on customers’ propensity to switch from their banking service provider, is therefore, very much relevant. Empirical studies have revealed that there is a significant relationship between retention of customers and profitability. Therefore, to have an understanding of the behavioral pattern of the customers with respect to their intention to defect from their bank is financially justified. This paper investigates the relationship between service quality and switching behavior of customers in the context of the largest nationalized bank of India –State Bank of India (SBI) for two of their branches in sub-urban West Bengal namely Bolpur and Santiniketan.

In this study, the integrated forward/reverse logistics network is investigated, and a capacitated multi-stage, multi-product logistics network design is proposed by formulating a generalized logistics network problem into a mixed-integer nonlinear programming model (MINLP) for minimizing the total cost of the closed-loop supply chain network. Moreover, the proposed model is solved by using optimization solver, which provides the decisions related to the facility location problem, optimum quantity of shipped product, and facility capacity. Numerical results show the power of the proposed MINLP model to avoid th sub-optimality caused by separate design of forward and reverse logistics networks and to handle various transportation modes and periodic demand.