This study investigated the effect of strategic planning and total quality management practices on organisational productivity. This study employed a quantitative approach using Jamovi software. Sample data were collected from 167 respondents who are in Tanzania Zambia Railway Authority (TAZARA) management using a structured-questionnaire. Model fit and construct validity were checked using confirmatory factor analysis and correlation matrix while mediation analysis was carried out using GLM procedure. The results of study present that strategic planning has a significant effect on productivity. The results also indicate that customer focus and important innovation foster organizational productivity and partially mediate the relationship between strategic planning and productivity. The study also shows that education and training has no significant effect on productivity and does not mediate strategic planning and productivity association.

The study's major purpose is to determine the factors that affect the settlement of land complaints and propose some policy implications to improve the settlement of land complaints. Experts are asked about the factors that may affect and their impact rates on the settlement of land complaints when the State acquires land. The proposed research model has 5 hypothetical latent variables and 17 hypothetical observed variables. As a result of the model being tested by SPSS 20.0 software, all hypothetical latent variables and hypothetical observed variables satisfy the test criteria. The impact rates of the hypothetical latent variables range from 9.19% to 36.15%. The group of implementing complaint settlement factors has the strongest influence, and the group of legal factors has the weakest influence. Policy proposals include improving settlement procedures and land databases, strengthening facilities and personnel, and perfecting the legal provisions for complaint resolution.

The Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) is one of the classical combinatorial optimization problems and is known for its diverse applications. The QAP is an NP-hard optimization problem which attracts the use of heuristic or metaheuristic algorithms that can find quality solutions in an acceptable computation time. On the other hand, there is quite a broad spectrum of mathematical programming techniques that were developed for finding the lower bounds for the QAP. This paper presents a fusion of the two approaches whereby the solutions from the computations of the lower bounds are used as the starting points for a metaheuristic, called HC12, which is implemented on a GPU CUDA platform. We perform extensive computational experiments that demonstrate that the use of these lower bounding techniques for the construction of the starting points has a significant impact on the quality of the resulting solutions.

This article presents a novel algorithm based on the cluster first-route second method, which executes a solution through K-means and Optics clustering techniques and Nearest Neighbor and Local Search 2-opt heuristics, for the solution of a vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW). The objective of the problem focuses on reducing distances, supported by the variables of demand, delivery points, capacities, time windows and type of fleet in synergy with the model's taxonomy, based on data referring to deliveries made by a logistics operator in Colombia. As a result, good solutions are generated in minimum time periods after fulfilling the agreed constraints, providing high performance in route generation and solutions for large customer instances. Similarly, the algorithm demonstrates efficiency and competitiveness compared to other methods detailed in the literature, after being benchmarked with the Solomon instance data set, exporting even better results.

Hybrid flowshop scheduling problem (HFSP) is a mixture of two classical scheduling problems as parallel machine scheduling (PMS) and flowshop scheduling (FS). In the HFSP, a series of jobs are processed respectively in a set of stages that at least one of these stages has more than one parallel machine (identical, uniform or unrelated). HFSP is a widespreadly studied subject in the literature and there are various application areas such as transportation, healthcare management, agricultural activities, cloud computing, and the most common manufacturing. Therefore, it will be useful to present a review study including recent papers and developments related to this problem for researchers. For this aim, in this paper, a systematic literature survey has been conducted with respect to HFSPs by means of Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) methodology which enables to realize systematic review and meta-analyses in a specified subject. 172 articles which are published in the 2010-2020 year interval, related to production scheduling and including a mathematical programming model to express scheduling problems have been determined as a result of this methodological review process. These articles have been statistically analyzed according to many features such as year, country, journal, number of stages, type of parallel machines, constraints, objective functions, solution methods, test instances and type of parameters. The results of statistical analyses have been presented through charts so as to provide a visual demonstration to researchers. Furthermore, it has been aimed to answer 14 predetermined research questions by means of analyses realized in the scope of this review study. Consequently, it has revealed the existing literature, recent developments and future research suggestions related to HFSP and therefore it is possible to say that this review paper provides a beneficial road map for researchers studying in this field.

This study evaluates the impact of project procurement strategies on supply chain efficiency in the Jordanian construction industry, with vendor relationship management as a mediating variable. The target population was the 25000 construction industry specialists in Jordan. According to purposeful sampling technique and more specifically, stratified random sampling, 454 subjects were asked to complete questionnaires. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was employed for the analysis of data for the test of the hypotheses. This research also revealed that the project procurement strategies which are Just-In-Time, Multiple Sourcing, and Single Sourcing have positive impacts with a statistical significance to the supply chain efficiency dimensions of Demand Forecasting, Supply Chain Integration and Collaboration and Communication. Vendor relationship management was also a partial mediator to these relations. These implications can be summed up for the construction firms and policymakers in Jordan to understand how strategic procurement approach and proper relations with the vendors can improve the performance of the supply chain. This work aims to benefit the academia as it fills a gap in the existing literature by analysing the relationship between procurement strategies, its actors (vendors), and supply chain performance within a developing country environment. The analysis with the help of PLS-SEM enables us to look at both the direct and the indirect effects in such relationships.

This paper aims at presenting a customer order scheduling environment in which the setup times are explicit and depend on the production sequence. The considered objective function is the total tardiness minimization. Since the variant under study is NP-hard, we propose a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model, an adaptation of the Order-Scheduling Modified Due-Date heuristic (OMDD) (referred to as Order-Scheduling Modified Due-Date Setup (OMMD-S)), an adaptation of the Framinan and Perez-Gonzalez heuristic (FP) (hereinafter referred to as Framinan and Perez-Gonzalez Setup (FP-S)), a matheuristic with Same Permutation in All Machines (SPAM), and the hybrid matheuristic SPAM-SJPO based on Job-Position Oscillation (JPO). The algorithms under comparison have been compared on an extensive benchmark of randomly generated test instances, considering two performance measures: Relative Deviation Index (RDI) and Success Rate (SR). For the small-size evaluated instances, the SPAM is the most efficient algorithm, presenting the better values of RDI and SR. For the large-size evaluated instances, the hybrid matheuristic SPAM-JPO and MILP model are the most efficient methods.

The export development of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Indonesia is still very low, resulting in their contribution to national exports being very small as well. Government bodies and relevant stakeholders are actively pursuing initiatives to enhance the export performance of SMEs. These efforts include improving the quality of human and social capital and promoting the integration of digital technology into SME operations. This examination evaluates the impact of human capital (HC), social capital (SC), and the utilization of digital technology on the export performance of SMEs. The investigation adopted a survey approach on all export-oriented SMEs listed on the Bank Indonesia website. Data was obtained through the distribution of questionnaires to 614 SMEs. Data analysis was conducted using PLS SEM. The research findings indicate that human capital, social capital, and digital technology have a positive and significant influence on the export performance of SMEs in Indonesia.

This paper aims to explore the influence of digital supply chain flexibility in five-star Hotels on smart quality systems together with its mediating effect through sustainable procurement practices within KSA. The methodology used is quantitative, based on data collected from a sample of five-star Hotels in KSA. Based on the above findings, this study argues about an integral part of DSCF (Digital Supply Chain Flexibility), SP and SQS for adopting theoretical framework. In this study, partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was used to validate the hypotheses. Digital supply chain flexibility has a significant positive relationship with sustainable procurement practices and smart quality systems in five-star Hotels. This means that actions such as fostering sustainable procurement practices could act on the ability of digital supply chain flexibility to boost smart quality systems, which play a role in enhancing operational efficiency and service quality. This paper contributes to the examination of various strategies for digital supply chains with sustainable procurement practices and creative quality systems within the hospitality sector; particularly focusing on KSA. Although the research findings are constrained to five-star Hotels from KSA they offer important directions for future research in different hospitality settings. These results provide practical information for hotels managers and policymakers on how digital supply chain flexibility, and sustainable procurement practices combined would contribute to the high-quality service provision as well as operational resilience of five-star Hotels. While these lessons have been drawn from the KSA market, they are also relevant to other hospitality markets with hospitality markets worldwide. This is the first study to examine Mediating Role of Sustainable Procurement and Digital Supply Chain Flexibility Impact on Smart Quality Systems Study in Five-Star Hospitals in KSA.

Hybrid algorithms are widely used today to increase the performance of existing algorithms. In this paper, a new hybrid algorithm called IMVOSA that is based on multi-verse optimizer (MVO) and simulated annealing (SA) is used. In this model, a new method called the black hole selection (BHS) is proposed, in which exploration and exploitation can be increased. In the BHS method, the acceptance probability feature of the SA algorithm is used to increase exploitation by searching for the best regions found by the MVO algorithm. The proposed IMVOSA algorithm has been tested on 50 benchmark functions. The performance of IMVOSA has been compared with other latest and well-known metaheuristic algorithms. The consequences show that IMVOSA produces highly successful and competitive results.