A green and efficient method for the synthesis of (4 or 5)-aryl-2-aryloyl-(1H)-imidazoles via self-condensation reaction of arylglyoxal hydrates in the presence of ammonium acetate using water as solvent under ultrasonic irradiation was reported. The reactions proceeded in high yields and very short reaction time. Introduced procedure is completely ecofriendly and don’t need any toxic organic solvent in all performing steps. In addition, we use computational chemistry for acquiring some information about the thermochemistry and geometrical structure of these imidazole derivatives.

These days, we see an increasing competition among different business owners and they strive for customer retention. Customer relationship management plays an important role to increase business performance and attracting new customers in an attempt to have more market shares. One primary concern is to find more about important factors influencing customers being satisfied with different services they may receive. This paper performs an empirical investigation to find important factors influencing customer relationship management (CRM) in information and communication firm is city of Tehran, Iran. The survey uses factor analysis to find important factors using a questionnaire consist of 27 variables. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.861, which validates the questionnaire. The survey detects six factors influencing CRM learning performance attributes, enterprise resource planning, perception attributes, structure oriented, perception image and organizational resources.

The investigation of dynamic response of intervertebral disc is beneficial for the development of new synthetic and engineered tissues for treating diseased or injured disc. There are limited experimental studies on comparing the effect of loading mode and rate on global response of intervertebral disc. In this study, in-vitro experiments were performed using a total of 24 porcine motion segments. The harvested specimens were assigned to prolong and 2 different cyclic loadings. Both disc deformations and water contents were measured to investigate how the mode and rate of loading affect the response of intervertebral disc. In parallel, a backward FE poroelastic model combined with in-vitro experiments were used to find the material properties of intervertebral discs. The experimental result showed that the final disc height loss under creep loading was significantly greater than cyclic groups. Increasing the frequency of cyclic loading decreased the disc height loss. The water content decreased significantly in cyclic loading from those in prolong loading. The backward FE models showed that, the elastic modulus of anulus fibrosus and nucleus pulposus were 2.43 (±0.48) MPa and 1.46 (±0.29) MPa, respectively. The hydraulic permeability was 2.08 (±0.42) ×10-16m4/Ns, and the Poisson’s ratio was 0.21 (±0.03). In conclusion, this study investigated how the loading mode and rate affect porcine intervertebral disc deformation. It is found that dynamic stiffness is greater at higher frequencies which resulted from interactions between the solid phase and fluid flow within the disc.

Procurement risks analysis is a crucial study in supply chain risk management. According to the phenomenon of snow ball effect, if a risk occurs at the primitive node between buyer and supplier, it will be strengthened and extended throughout the entire network. Hence, it can have more disruptive influences comparing with risks that happen in further nodes. In this paper, through a case study, the most important risk factors and its multi-dimensional consequences in procurement risk analysis is derived from the literature review and implementing a Delphi method that takes into account the nine risks factors and 39 preliminary variables as risk consequences. The nine risk factors are limits of global communication, packaging and transportation, procedures and standards, sanction, supply of equipment, price of equipment, Communication, management of technology and delivery mistakes.

Today Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM) still remains as an attempt alone. For more than a decade, supply chain evolution to be a low carbon chain in an energy and resource constrained world has been posing greater challenges. Though environmental policies remain without much variation towards green operations in an industry, the implantation strategies and stages vary. There have been a number of studies by researchers and a lot of endeavors by organizations to build a green supply chain, mainly because of pressure from the professional bodies like EPA, WEEE, OECD, and Clean Air Act to reduce emissions with growing concerns over climate change issues, global warming, and requirements from policy makers, end users, stake holders and others. But, at the implementation level there lacked a proper framework on GSCM which suggests guidelines for proper planning and coordination, and the practices to be adopted. This indicates the need for a complete strategic approach on the part of decision makers across the supply chain to have sustainability as a corporate social responsibility. The research gap exists in a holistic perception with regard to a product when supply chain stages are mapped for sustainability due to diverse environmental issues. Also, to build a holistic approach, we must know how the stages and levels interact. Thus, in this work, a Parametric Matrix demarking various level and stages of a supply chain related to a product, in general, is developed from various literatures till date. Such a metric will be useful for the industries to identify the bottleneck areas in their supply chain towards sustainability. Hence, the desired and relevant level of factors to be considered at each stage to become green can easily be decided.

In recent years, researchers have been interested in scheduling algorithms to avoid deadlock in Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS). FMS are discrete event systems characterized by the availability of resources to produce a set of products. Raw parts, which belong to various product types, enter the system at discrete times and are processed concurrently while sharing a limited number of resources. In such systems, a situation may occur in which parts become permanently block. This is called deadlock. This paper presents the sufficient conditions for deadlock to exist in a FMS; it models a FMS using digraphs to calculate slack, knot, order and space; it identifies three types of circuits that are fundamental in determining if a FMS is in deadlock.

Safety is a relative quantity that is a function of the situation in which it is measured. This research has been conducted in a well established pharmaceutical company in Bangladesh practicing GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice), which has a tablet manufacturing facility. Tablet manufacturing comprises a number of manufacturing activities and machineries. Each of these activities, requiring amalgamated interaction of man, machine, equipment and environment has the potential of producing unforeseen hazards. Therefore, analysis of risk to assure worker safety is not only necessary here, it is also important to use an appropriate tool that can incorporate all the risk- producing parameters. The research work conducted here using a very effective tool named Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA), consisted of observing the works at different sections, breaking them down into sequential steps, noting the surrounding variables of each task, and using these data to perform risk analysis to find out the most hazardous works for the workers.

During the past few years, operations research applications in health care operation management have grown quickly. On the other hand blood as a perishable, valuable and lifesaving product is one important asset of any healthcare center. Therefore, designing a blood supply network comes to importance. It also should be noted that a blood supply chain comprises specific modifications. This study intends to locate blood bank components in a network, and to determine the allocations among the network components. The supply chain components considered in this study are donation sites, testing and processing labs, blood banks, and demand points. It is known that demand centers such as hospitals and clinics highly depend on blood products and any deficiency in procurement can even result in a person’s death. Thus, in the last layer of the considered network a transshipment sub-network is considered between demand points. Most of the intricacies in problem formulation of blood supply chain are regarded in this study; cases such as blood wastage, blood product decomposition in lab facilities, and transshipments between demand points. Due to the fact that for such an important and lifesaving supply chain the aim would go beyond minimizing cost, another objective function is presented for the problem. Hence, to obtain a Pareto solution for both objective functions ?-constraint method is utilized. Finally, to demonstrate the applicability of the problem, the model is implemented on a number of problem sets.

During the past few years, there has been increasing interest in making online transaction. As people become more interested in using internet for their daily business activities such as regular communications, financial transactions, etc., there will be more concerns on security of available data. In fact, data security is the primary concern in today’s online activities. This paper performs an empirical investigation to find important factors influencing data security in Municipality is city of Tehran, Iran. The survey uses factor analysis to find important factors using a questionnaire consist of 29 variables, which were reduced to 22 questions after considering skewness statistics. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.86, which validates the questionnaire. The survey detects six factors influencing feasibility study, organizational learning, management strategy, enterprise resource management, process approach and the acceptance.

Supply chains are changing due to changes in the global environment and to make the strategies effective most of the companies are striving towards the trends in the supply chain. Among the trends gamification is one of those that are creating an impact in the workspace with the techniques that are associated with it. Gamification in the supply chain had the least application and this study gave a road map for the decision makers like supply chain managers with the help of reviewing papers from the databases that are available. Findings say that giants like Amazon and Starbucks are applying gamification techniques to bring more transparency and visibility to reduce errors and to mitigate errors. This paper is providing evidence from the different activities like order management, warehousing activities with case applications are discussed. We conducted systematic literature review with 118 papers on gamification and 22 found relevant to the supply chain and its activities.