This paper examines the effect of supply chain on performance indicators including sales growth and market value in the context of manufacturing firms in Kuwait. The dimensions of supply chain; namely strategic supplier partnership, information sharing, and information quality are also added in the model. Along with sales growth and market value, industry leadership, future outlook, overall response to competition, overall business performance, employee’s productivity, process productivity, and success rate in the launching of new product are some of the important indicators for measuring firms’ performance. Both factor analysis and structural equation modelling approaches are applied to the sample of 314 respondents taken from the manufacturing firms in Kuwait. Factor analysis provides some evidence that all the indicators for supply chain and business performance can be considered for the structural modelling and regression analysis. The core findings under structural modelling indicate that both strategic supplier partnership and information sharing had positive and significant impacts on the overall business performance. However, information quality appears to be the insignificant determinant of business performance. For the sales growth and market value, strategic supplier partnership and information sharing are significant determinants obtained through the regression analysis. The originality of the study can be viewed with reference to the selected performance measures and their determination through supply chain management. However, this study is confined only to the manufacturing sector and the services sector can be focused by incorporating additional performance measures and suitable sample size in future studies.

In recent years, there has been an increase consensus that the firms’ social responsibility plays an essential role for the success of the firms. To address the need to be socially and environmentally responsible, this paper considers a firm, which makes a production decision under the carbon emission cap and trade system. The objective of this study is to examine the impact of the firm’s flexible operational strategy, called a reactive capacity production strategy, on the firm’s managerial efficiency under the carbon cap and trade system. The reactive capacity production strategy has been widely used for agile response on the market. The study shows that the firm with reactive capacity production strategy under the carbon cap and trade market may choose the first production quantity less than the firm without reactive capacity and provide more profit than the firm without reactive capacity. Also, the study analytically provides the optimal solution for the expected amount of carbon emission traded on the carbon trading market and the expected total amount of carbon emission by the firm with reactive capacity under the carbon cap and trade market.

Nowadays, most manufacturing units try to locate their requirements and the depot vehicle routing in order to transport the goods at optimum cost. Needless to mention that the locations of the required warehouses influence on the performance of vehicle routing. In this paper, a mathematical programming model to optimize the storage location and vehicle routing are presented. The first objective function of the model minimizes the total cost associated with the transportation and storage, and the second objective function minimizes the difference distance traveled by vehicles. The study uses Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) to solve the resulted problems in different sizes. The preliminary results have indicated that the proposed study has performed better than NSGA-II and PAES methods in terms of Quality metric and Spacing metric.

Knowledge sharing plays an important role in management of universities. Vietnam universities are not highly regarded for their teaching quality and scientific research. It is therefore necessary to promote knowledge sharing through two central processes: knowledge donation and collection as well as individual performance of lecturers. Based on a sample size survey of 312 university lecturers in Vietnam and the methods of analyzing exploration factor (EFA), factor analysis (CFA), structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the hypotheses of the survey, the study determines that two individual factors; namely job satisfaction and other involvement significantly influenced knowledge donation process. One individual factor also positively influences knowledge collection process, knowledge self-efficacy, and lecturers’ willingness to donate knowledge to improve individual performance. Finally, several suggestions for enhancing the knowledge sharing and individual performance of lecturers for university managers are given.

The present study investigates an inventory model for non-instantaneous deteriorating items under inflationary conditions with partially backlogged shortages. In today’s market structure consumers are looking for goods for which there is a delay in deterioration. At the same time, the consumers’ willingness to wait has been decreased over time, which leads to lost sales. Moreover in financial decision-making, the effects of inflation and time value of money cannot be oblivious to an inventory system. In this scenario, managing inventory of goods remains a challenging task for the decision makers, who may also have to rent warehouse under different prevailing factors such as, bulk discount, limited space in the retail outlet, or increasing inflation rates. With a focus on reduction of costs and increasing customer service, warehouse decision models are crucial for an organization’s profitability. Hence a mathematical model has been developed in the view of above scenario, in order to determine the optimal policy for the decision maker, by minimizing the present worth of total cost. The optimization procedure has been illustrated by a numerical example and detailed sensitivity analysis of the optimal solution has been performed to showcase the effect of various parameters. Managerial implications has also been presented to aid the decision making process.

Ethics plays an essential role for the success of all business units. These days, it is not sufficient to boost the performance of supply chain companies just by focusing on financial figures but we need to consider the ethical dimensions, particularly at an organizational level. It is evident from the prior investigations that the performance of the supply chain industry in most of the Arab countries has not gained reasonable growth. Most of the Arab countries are facing issues for development good supply chain management in various departments. Bahrain maintains a low performance in the supply chain compared with other Arab countries such as Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. The logistics index of Bahrain has been decreasing in recent years. Therefore, to address this problem, the objective of this study is to examine the role of workplace ethics in supply chain management among supply chain companies of Bahrain. The study considers three dimensions of ethics, namely; organization culture ethics, leadership ethics, and training ethics. Employees on the managerial positions are selected as the respondents. These respondents are selected from the supply chain companies of Bahrain. Questionnaires are distributed among these employees to collect the data. By using the structural equation modeling, data are analyzed through PLS. The results conclude that workplace ethics has significant contribution in supply chain management. Better implementation of workplace ethics always contributes positively on supply chain management.

The aim of this paper was to investigate the effect of the gross domestic product (GDP) and population on the investment yield of sharia insurance in Indonesia. This research used a causal research design with Indonesian sharia insurance as the focus. The secondary data were sourced from the Financial Services Authority (OJK) of Indonesia in 2016–2017. The analysis was performed with Smart Partial Least Square (PLS) software and indicated that the GDP did not influence the investment yield; however, the population did influence the investment yield of sharia insurance in Indonesia. The implications of this study are expected to recommend to the Indonesia Financial Services Authority regarding the impact of the GDP and population on the investment yield in Indonesia. In addition, the implication provides support for the Indonesian monetary policy authorities to anticipate the monetary policy by the Fed, regarding dovish and hawkish sentiments, to encourage capital inflows to emerging countries due to the impact on the development of Sharia/Takaful insurance in Indonesia. A social implication is that the sharia insurance industry in Indonesia can develop if the public can enjoy convenience in applying for premiums and ease in receiving sharia insurance claims. The majority of Indonesia's population of Moslems requires an openness in the process. This study takes a sample of different sharia industry characteristics to compare sharia and conventional types of industry.

The real estate and construction industry have significantly played a particularly important role in economic development in each economy. In the case of Vietnam, the real estate and construction industry have greatly contributed a large proportion to the gross domestic product (GDP) growth with a sustainable annual growth. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of manager’s ability, wage minimum policy, and firm size on firm performance. Using 220 real estate and construction firms in the case of Vietnam, results depict that a greater ability of managers in the real estate and construction sector will significantly enhance the efficiency of businesses. In addition, a larger firm can reach a higher firm efficiency while the efficiency of the real estate and construction firms is not impacted by changes of wage minimum policy.

The primary objective of this paper is to investigate the mediation role of port supply chain integration between Human Resource Management (HRM) practices and port performance (PP) in Kingdome of Saudi Arabia. The present study employed partial lest square structural equation modeling technique to analyze the collected data. The study found some positive significant direct relationship between HRP, port supply chain integration (PSCI) and PP. Besides, this study also found some positive and significant relationship between HRP and PSCI. Additionally, the study confirms the mediating role of PSCI between HRP and PP. The study contributes to the literature and to the practice of ports to understand how the process of HRP and PSCI produces better port performance.