Financial performance is an evaluation of a company's assets, liabilities, equity, expenses, revenues, and profitability. This evaluation provides an overview of the company's overall financial health during a certain period. Resource Based Theory states several factors that can affect financial performance, namely intellectual capital and competitive advantage. This research was conducted with a quantitative approach. The observed population of this research is all BPRs in Bali Province which are still operating in 2017 - 2021. Determination of the sample in this study using the census method or saturated sample so that the sample used in this study was 133 BPRs in Bali Province. The analysis technique used in this research is path analysis with Eviews version 9.0 software. The test results show that intellectual capital has no effect on financial performance, intellectual capital has a positive effect on competitive advantage, competitive advantage has a positive effect on financial performance and competitive advantage is able to mediate the effect of intellectual capital on financial performance. The results of this study are expected to contribute to various interested parties, namely the development of Resource Based Theory as a theoretical benefit and BPR management, government, OJK, society and the banking industry as practical beneficiaries.

This study investigates the generalized stiffness of laterally functionally graded materials (LFGMs) and applies these findings to dynamic beam elements. The generalized stiffnesses of LFGM, coupled with material and cross-sectional properties such as flexural and axial rigidity, mass per unit length, and mass-moment of inertia, are explicitly formulated. In the context of LFGM, material properties depend on an asymmetrical power law function with respect to cross-sectional depth. An example of the generalized numerical stiffness of a circular cross-section is provided for various material properties. To illustrate the application of generalized stiffness to dynamic beam elements, free vibration of LFGM beams with rotary inertia is considered. The dimensionless differential equation governing the free vibration of such beams is derived and numerically solved to obtain natural frequencies and corresponding mode shapes. Numerical results demonstrate a good consistency with the finite element method.

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are a relatively new class of materials of unique porous structures and exceptional properties. Currently, more than 110,000 types of MOFs have been reported among the countless possibilities. In this study, we have synthesised a novel MOF using zirconium chloride as the metal source and 4,4'-dicarboxy-2,2'-biquinoline (bicinchoninic acid disodium salt) as the linker, which reacted in N,N-Dimethylformamide (DMF) solvent. Three preparation methods were employed to prepare five types of the MOF, and they were compared to optimize the synthesis conditions. The resulting MOFs, named Zr-BADS, were characterised using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), microscopy, and X-ray diffraction (XRD). By incorporating methanol into the preparation solvent, the surface area was increased to 396 m2/g. Additionally, the prepared MOFs exhibited amorphous shapes, with variations in size depending on the synthesis method. This research demonstrates the significance of the preparation method in controlling resulting particles’ properties.

The importance of quality and innovation in today’ 21 st century cannot be over emphasised, therefore organisations require leadership styles that can embrace both innovation and quality in order to confront today’s dynamic competitive fierce environment. Sometimes organisations fail to attain or maintain their competitiveness because of limited understanding regarding these strategic variables. There is little research that has attempted to analyse the direct and indirect-relationships among these strategic variables. Therefore this study attempted to bridge the gap in literature by analysing how important-innovations and quality-results as TQM practices influence the association between transformational leadership-style and competitive advantage using sample data collected from TAZARA employees in management using Jamovi. The study shows that transformational leadership style, quality-results and important innovations have significant positive effects on competitive advantage. The results also show that important-innovations and quality-results both individually and collectively partially mediate the relationship between transformational-leadership and competitive- advantage. Managers and advocates of transformational leadership style are emphasised to be aware and cautious of quality results and important innovations at all-time especially in today’s dynamic environment.

We consider a no-wait m-machine flowshop scheduling problem which is common in different manufacturing industries such as steel, pharmaceutical, and chemical. The objective is to minimize total tardiness since it minimizes penalty costs and loss of customer goodwill. We also consider the performance measure of total completion time which is significant in environments where reducing holding cost is important. We consider both performance measures with the objective of minimizing total tardiness subject to the constraint that total completion time is bounded. Given that the problem is NP-hard, we propose an algorithm. We conduct extensive computational experiments to compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with those of three well performing benchmark algorithms in the literature. Computational results indicate that the proposed algorithm reduces the error of the best existing benchmark algorithm by 88% under the same CPU times. The results are confirmed by extensive statistical analysis. Specifically, ANOVA analysis is conducted to justify the difference between the performances of the algorithms, and a test of hypothesis is performed to justify that the proposed algorithm is significantly better than the best existing benchmark algorithm with a significance level of 0.01.

Considering the increasing demand for cosmetic surgery and the number of private cosmetic surgery clinics, it is essential to measure and manage the quality of services provided by these clinics. Obtaining sufficient knowledge about the content perceived by the clients of the quality of services provided by specialized clinics can affect identifying improvement opportunities and criteria that will cause their competitive advantage, and on the other hand, it also prevents wasting resources. For this purpose, this study aims to identify, evaluate, and prioritize the criteria for quality improvement in cosmetic surgery clinics. First, the effective criteria focus on the quality of medical services have been identified by reviewing the research background. Then, the identified criteria in the case study are customized by the Delphi method, and then the DEMATEL-based analytic network process method (DANP) is applied to reveal their causal relationships between criteria and sub-criteria to determine the direct and indirect influences, and finally, all of them are prioritized. In the end, based on the obtained results and knowledge of experienced medical experts in the case study, some managerial solutions are proposed to improve the quality of the provided medical services.

The research aims to investigate how strategic entrepreneurship through innovative effectiveness is used to create value within firms. Using structural equation modeling, data from 55 private hospitals in Jordan were gathered. For this research, 230 directors, managers, and department heads were enlisted. An entrepreneurial mindset was found to have a significant and positive correlation with innovative effectiveness while having a business alignment also had a positive and significant correlation with innovative effectiveness. However, innovative effectiveness had a positive but insignificant correlation with the creation of firm value. The research concluded that strategic entrepreneurship had a positive effect on the creation of firm value.

The inhibiting effect of chloroquine compounds (ChCs) on the SARS-CoV-2 virus represents a highly debated form of study owing to the emerging proposals of mechanistic implications for exploring the mode of action of ChCs on the virus. Keeping in view the emerging significance of chloroquine derivatives, the present study was performed to screen one hundred and ninety known chloroquine derivatives for their interaction with several SARS-CoV-2 target proteins by molecular docking and molecular dynamics simulations to obtain an in-depth understanding of the potential hits of these compounds against SARS-CoV-2. A total of 190 molecules from the chloroquine family were screened for the identification of potential new inhibitors of the three therapeutic target proteins of SARS-CoV-2, namely Mpro (master protease), PLpro (papain-like protease) and SGp-RBD (spike glycoprotein receptor binding domain). The ChCs bound to SARS-COV-2 Mpro, PLpro, and SGp-RBD were generated by molecular docking and molecular dynamics simulations. Herein, a comparative analysis of chloroquine family products and a well-known drug against SARS-CoV-2, called Remdesivir, has also been presented. This investigation is intended to study the mechanism of interaction between ChCs and the SARS-CoV-2 virus and explore the unprecedented areas associated with the inhibitory activity of ChCs against this virus.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) play a crucial role in the Indian economy. To remain competitive in the global market, application of Lean Manufacturing Techniques (LMT) helps SMEs to improve their processes in alignment with customer needs. The purpose of this study is to reduce overall lead time by identification and eliminating non-value added activities (NVA) from the manufacturing system. In this paper, the current manufacturing processes have been thoroughly studied using the principle of work study. Several lean approaches such as- TAKT time computation, Value stream Mapping (VSM), layout optimization, Kanban, Andon etc. have been used to make improvement in line efficiency and hence productivity. The study shows that use of line balancing technique, matches the cycle time with calculated TAKT time. And the efficiency of the line has increased approx 10% and hence balance delay got reduced. Again VSM helps to reduce the lead time of foundry shops by 51 minutes. It is one of the few studies that deal with productivity improvement in Indian SME.

Real life inventory lot sizing problems are frequently challenged with the need to order different types of items within the same batch. The Joint Replenishment Problem (JRP) addresses this setting of coordinated ordering by minimizing the total cost, composed of ordering (or setup) costs and holding costs, while satisfying the demand. The complexity of this problem increases when some or all item types are prone to obsolescence. In fact, the items may experience an abrupt decline in demand because they are no longer needed, due to rapid advancements in technology, going out of fashion, or ceasing to be economically viable. This article proposes an extension of the Joint Replenishment Problem (JRP) where the items may suddenly become obsolete at some time in the future. The model assumes constant demand and the items’ lifetimes follow independent negative exponential distributions. The optimization process considers the time value of money by using the expected discounted total cost as the minimization criterion. The proposed model was applied to some test cases, and sensitivity analyses were performed, in order to assess the impact of obsolescence on the ordering policy. The increase in the obsolescence risk, through the progressive increase of the obsolescence rates of the item types, determines smaller lot sizes on the ordering policy. The increase in the discount rate causes smaller quantities to be ordered as well.