Human Resource Management is relatively a new concept in small firms in Pakistan. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of some of the human resource practices on organizational performance in small manufacturing firms. Using various statistical techniques confirming the adequacy of the model for small manufacturing firms, the result of the study based on the data collected through questionnaires, revealed that HR practices like recruitment, training, compensation and promotion do affect performance of organization. The intensity of these effect are positively mediated by HR outcomes i.e. employees skill, attitude and behavior. Thus it can be safely concluded that although the nature of HR practices in small firms is informal but the organizational performance can be improved by adopting carefully tailored HR practices keeping in mind the limited resources of small firms.

E-commerce and online shopping is the future of global trade, hence the importance of building E-customer loyalty and maintaining it in the electronic markets becomes even more important. This paper attempts to identify factors affecting the value of electronic commerce in the Saudi environment. Likewise, it explores the impact of these factors on E- customer loyalty. Simple random sampling was used for the purposes of the current study, as the first study included 247 electronic customers. Data were collected through electronic questionnaires sent to the study participants. The results show that the factors had a positive impact in building E- customer loyalty Care, Character, Choice, Convenience, Customization, and Cultivation. Basically, e-commerce is considered a pioneer in business organizations today, and this is witnessed by its increasing and growing profits and expanding its market share, through its focus on the E-loyalty customers. Basically, e-commerce is considered a pioneer in business organizations today, and this is witnessed by its increasing and growing profits and expanding its market share, through its focus on the E-loyalty customers.

In this paper, an imperfect production inventory system with multi-production run for single vendor and single buyer is studied where the defective items are reworked after several production processes and there is no break down during the rework process. The model is considered for deteriorating items under two delivery policies in order to determine the delivery policy leading to the minimum holding cost of system. The objective of this model is to determine the optimal production setup, number of deliveries and lot size by minimizing the total relevant cost of the proposed vendor-buyer integrated system. To minimize the manufacturer’s and buyer’s holding cost, the supply of finished products are made in small quantities. The total relevant cost of the vendor and the buyer is derived and a numerical example is presented to demonstrate the utility of the model.

Nowadays enterprises should consider seeking to reduce the supply chain risks as a crucial part of their activities in order to improve their competitiveness in the international context. Choosing the suitable strategy in connection with assigning some parts of the production process to outside the organization is a complex multi-criteria decision making problem and it gets more complicated when supply chain risk factors as the factors to select the strategy as well as dependence and the close ties between these criteria also be considered. In this paper, after the identification of risks in the supply chain of a medical equipment manufacturer company, dependence and ties between criteria in line with choosing the best strategy among existing alternatives has been examined in the form of a combined ANP-ELECTRE method. This combined model is of high performance to give a solution to the problem considered in this paper. But given the complex and time consuming nature of the AHP and ELECTRE, in this study a meta-heuristic algorithm is developed called SIMANP that despite the simplicity of computing and high-speed, is good in the terms of precision and efficiency. The results of comparing SIMANP algorithm and the proposed ANP - ELECTRE method are presented at the end.

Purchasing decisions on the Traveloka application has experienced a significant decline since the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak. Ticket returns and refunds that occur due to travel restrictions have resulted in a decline in Traveloka's brand image. This study aims to analyze how brand image mediates the effect of perceived ease of use, electronic word of mouth and content marketing towards ticket purchasing decisions on the Traveloka application which was conducted on 130 respondents using the Traveloka application. The research was conducted in June 2021 with data analysis using SmartPLS 3.2.0 software. The results show that perceived ease of use had a negative impact on purchasing decisions, either directly or indirectly through brand image. Electronic word of mouth had a positive impact on purchasing decisions either directly or indirectly through brand image. Content marketing had a negative and significant impact on purchasing decisions, while indirectly through brand image had a positive and significant impact. The role of brand image was very important in increasing the effect of perceived ease of use, electronic word of mouth and content marketing towards purchasing decisions.

In this paper, we consider the multi depot heterogeneous vehicle routing problem with time windows in which vehicles may be replenished along their trips. Using the modeling technique in a new-generation solver, we construct a novel formulation considering a rich series of constraint conditions and objective functions. Computation results are tested on an example comes from the real-world application and some cases obtained from the benchmark problems. The results show the good performance of local search method in the efficiency of replenishment system and generalization ability. The variants can be used to almost all kinds of vehicle routing problems, without much modification, demonstrating its possibility of practical use.

In this study, the behavior of two buildings designed with steel structures Buckling Restrained Braced (BRB) and conventional bending frame was studied to analyze their strengths against progressive collapse. The structures were designed and analyzed in accordance with Iranian regulation No. 2800 for the design of buildings. Using nonlinear static pushover analysis, the performance of the structure after removal of the center and the corner columns were investigated and it was demonstrated that removing the corner column provides more critical conditions for the investigated buildings. Furthermore, the use of BRB elements provides better performance for the analyzed buildings due to the ability of BRB in absorbing and dissipating more energy induced from the external loading sources like the earthquake.

This study empirically investigates the mediating effect of brand satisfaction on the relationship between brand personality and brand loyalty among Malaysian customers toward local automobile brands (Proton and Perodua). Four hypotheses were developed to test hypothesizing relationships between brand personality and brand satisfaction on brand loyalty. The data were collected from consumers of automobile brands in north Malaysia peninsula from three states which were Kedah, Penanag, and Perlis. This study applies partial least squares to a sample of 458 customers to test hypothesized relationships. The findings indicate that brand personality and brand satisfaction appear to have a positive and significant relationship with brand loyalty. Moreover, brand satisfaction was found to be a mediator in the relationship between brand personality and brand loyalty. The results are compared with earlier findings and implications for further research are discussed.

This study aims to analyze the improvement of the operational performance of Indonesia’s Soekarno-Hatta Airport train through service quality which is mediated by train passenger loyalty and passenger satisfaction. The main problems in this study are the use of the same railway for long-distance train, airport train, and commuter Line train, the limited use of airport railway with four schedules, the headway which becomes 30 minutes since the number of travels becomes 82 trips, and the tariff being applied now is considered as burdening the passengers. The research method uses a quantitative analysis approach with the technique of Structural Equation Modeling-Lisrel. Data collection is done through observation and questionnaire distribution. The respondents are 306 passengers of trains heading for Soekarno-Hatta Airport. The benefit of this study for the domestic railway company is that by improving service quality, passenger loyalty and satisfaction, it will improve the operational performance of airport trains. The result of this research indicates the significant influence of service quality variable on passenger loyalty through passenger satisfaction, the significant influence of service quality variable on operational performance through passenger satisfaction and passenger loyalty as well as the significant influence of passenger satisfaction variable on operational performance through passenger loyalty.

This article presents a broad review of Hub location problem (HLP), and its applications. The goal of this article is to provide a review on the newest and most recent publications on Hub location and its application in real world practices since 2013. While, there are some articles which reviewed hub location problem literature but some models were not covered in those articles. In this paper, we try to include capacitated models. We survey advances in analysis and modeling of the hub location problem including its variants and solution algorithm of HLPs. We emphasize the most applicable areas for Marine Transpiration. We show that first, majority of the articles consider network domain, while there are some articles which execute HLP in discrete and continuous domain. Also, the capacitated case attracts more attention in recent years. Finally, the contribution of any type of HLP in the literature is shown schematically.