Knowledge management plays an essential role on developing efficient systems in educational systems. However, there are different factors influencing the success of knowledge management. In this paper, we review recent advances on implementation of knowledge management (KM) in different areas and discuss why some of KM implementations fail and how they could turn to a successful one. The review focus more on recently published papers in different perspective from the implementation of KM in educational units to KM implementation on project management field.

Lean is a continuous journey to grow and excel the company. Any company want to develop and cope with the world pace must adopt lean. However, in most of the organizations the management culture or people’s mentality is not so good to embrace change. They have predestined mind set where no change is normally allowed. Lean is a cooperative way of working that involves all departments and all personnel to work together in a team for the betterment of the entire company. Without providing fixed solution of any problem it suggests the best way that people willingly accept to do. Lean normally deals with highest quality, shorter lead time and lowest cost. In Bangladesh, most of the garment manufacturing companies are experiencing a massive quality problem. We describe a case where traffic light, a tool of lean quality system was adopted to a garment manufacturing company in Bangladesh. We also provide the charts to contrast the before and after scenario in detail, in order to illustrate the company benefits. After the traffic light system being implemented, the quality status was improved, production capacity was increased; significant days were saved that enhanced the lead time and thus strengthen the supply chain.

Knowledge creation and innovation are primary competitive advantage in the modern economy. Social capital, on the other hand, is one the most important components of organizations, which could help share knowledge within organization and create competitive advantage. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of social capital on knowledge creation in petrochemical industry. The survey designs a questionnaire and distributes it among some experts who worked for petrochemical industry. The study investigates the impact of social capital in terms of three components of cognitive, relational and structural capitals on knowledge creation. Cronbach alpha in combined form is calculated as 0.79, which validates the overall survey. Structural equation modeling has been used to examine the proposed study and the results have confirmed that all three items positively influence knowledge creation, significantly.

Academic failure is one of the most important issues in educational systems and there are several attempts held to prevent such issues. In this paper, we study the relationship between school connection and academic failure among some high schools students in city of Esfahan, Iran during the academic calendar of 2011-2012. The study chooses a sample of 377 students based on clustering sampling technique and using Pearson correlation test as well as stepwise multiple regression technique, the relationship between school connection and academic failure is investigated. The result of Pearson correlation ratio indicates that there is meaningful relationship between these two components. In addition, the result of regression analysis indicates that 32% of students’ academic failure is determined by this ratio.

Total quality management (TQM) plays an important role on improving educational systems. In this paper, we present an empirical study to investigate the effect of TQM components on customer satisfaction in one of higher educational organizations in South East part of Iran called Qeshm. The proposed study investigates the effects of five TQM components including tangible, attitude, reliability, content and mode of delivery on customer satisfaction. The study designs a questionnaire consists of 37 questions and distributes it among a sample of university students and professors. Cronbach are calculated for significance, attitude, reliability, content and mode of delivery were 0.84, 0.83, 0.91, 0.90 and 0.83, respectively. The results of our survey are investigated using Pearson correlation ratios as well as regression analysis and the results indicate that all five components influence customer satisfaction, significantly.

Selecting a product development strategy that is associated with the company & apos; s current service or product innovation, based on customers’ needs and changing environment, plays an important role in increasing demand, increasing market share, increasing sales and profits. Therefore, it is important to extract effective variables associated with product development to improve performance measurement of firms. This paper investigates important factors influencing product development strategies using factor analysis. The proposed model of this paper investigates 36 factors and, using factor analysis, we extract six most influential factors including information sharing, intelligence information, exposure strategy, differentiation, research and development strategy and market survey. The first strategy, partnership, includes five sub-factor including product development partnership, partnership with foreign firms, customers’ perception from competitors’ products, Customer involvement in product development, inter-agency coordination, customer-oriented approach to innovation and transmission of product development change where inter-agency coordination has been considered the most important factor. Internal strengths are the most influential factors impacting the second strategy, intelligence information. The third factor, introducing strategy, introducing strategy, includes four sub criteria and consumer buying behavior is the most influencing factor. Differentiation is the next important factor with five components where knowledge and expertise in product innovation is the most important one. Research and development strategy with four sub-criteria where reducing product development cycle plays the most influential factor and finally, market survey strategy is the last important factor with three factors and finding new market plays the most important role.

E-banking plays an important role on increasing customer satisfaction and helps industry grow faster. Most banks try to retain their customers by introducing more electronic services to facilitate banking transactions. Creating loyalty through providing better banking services is a new area of research. In fact, e-loyalty can be directly impacted by e-satisfaction, e-trust, and indirectly influenced by e-services, perceived value, reputation, and habit. Therefore, the present paper deals with designing and explanation of loyalty formation model in e-banking. The preliminary results indicate that “satisfaction” is the most influential component affecting customer loyalty formation with an 87% diagnose coefficient. In addition, trust formation in customers may impact loyalty in an electronic environment with a 70% diagnose coefficient. Moreover, the most important factors impacting customer satisfaction include “reputation” “perceived value,” “service quality,” and “habit” with relative effects coefficients of 44%, 32%, 29%, and 26%, respectively. Finally, “reputation,” “service quality,” “habit” and “perceived value” have been the most important factors influencing customer trust with influence coefficients of 37%, 32%, 31%, and 24%, respectively.

Researchers have tried to investigate multiple factors affecting employees & apos; social, emotional, and psychological well-being. In this study particularly, nurses & apos; emotional and psychological well-being is considered. Of most important factors affecting well-being in place of work has known to be busy work and stress, constructive and destructive emotions, and psychological capital which. Present study considered to test a developed model of psychological capital, constructive and destructive emotions, stress, anxiety, and depression as antecedents of well-being. 296 nurses took part in the survey, using path analysis method hypotheses were tested, and the proposed model was evaluated. Results indicated that nurses & apos; high psychological capital increases their constructive emotions, reduces destructive emotions and eventually increase their well-being. The role of destructive emotions was more prominent in increasing wellbeing as well. Furthermore, stress had an incremental influence on well-being. In general, research results emphasize the need for more attention to the components of psychological capital, and intervention and coping strategies. The conclusions of a more detailed is that to improve nurses & apos; well-being the more emphasize should be on decreasing destructive emotions than increasing constructive ones. In addition, keeping an optimal level of stress is necessary for good functioning and improvement of overall well-being.

These days, There are several applications where we face with large data set and it has become an important part of common resources in different scientific areas. In fact, there are many applications where there are literally huge amount of information handled either in terabyte or in petabyte. Many scientists apply huge amount of data distributed geographically around the world through advanced computing systems. The huge volume data and calculations have created new problems in accessing, processing and distribution of data. The challenges of data management infrastructure have become very difficult under a large amount of data, different geographical spaces, and complicated involved calculations. Data Grid is a remedy to all mentioned problems. In this paper, a new method of dynamic optimal data replication in data grid is introduced where it reduces the total job execution time and increases the locality in accessibilities by detecting and impacting the factors influencing the data replication. Proposed method is composed of two main phases. During the first phase is the phase of file application and replication operation. In this phase, we evaluate three factors influencing the data replication and determine whether the requested file can be replicated or it can be used from distance. In the second phase or the replacement phase, the proposed method investigates whether there is enough space in the destination to store the requested file or not. In this phase, the proposed method also chooses a replica with the lowest value for deletion by considering three replica factors to increase the performance of system. The results of simulation also indicate the improved performance of our proposed method compared with other replication methods represented in the simulator Optorsim.

Insurance industry includes a significant part of economy and it is important to learn more about the capabilities of different firms, which are active in this industry. In this paper, we present an empirical study to rank the insurance firms using analytical hierarchy process as well as factor analysis. The study considers four criteria including capital adequacy, quality of earning, quality of cash flow and quality of firms’ assets. The results of the implementation of factor analysis (FA) have been verified using Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO=0.573) and Bartlett & apos; s Chi-Square (443.267 P-value=0.000) tests. According to the results FA, the first important factor, capital adequacy, represents 21.557% of total variance, the second factor, quality of income, represents 20.958% of total variance. In addition, the third factor, quality of cash flow, represents 19.417% of total variance and the last factor, quality of assets, represents 18.641% of total variance. The study has also used analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to rank insurance firms. The results of our survey indicate that capital adequacy (0.559) is accounted as the most important factor followed by quality of income (0.235), quality of cash flow (0.144) and quality of assets (0.061). The results of AHP are consistent with the results of FA, which somewhat validates the overall study.