One of the most important strategic issues for any enterprise is to create
and deliver superior value for its customers and provide enough
evidences to convince them not to choose another competitive. In this
study, we study the effects of customer value, customer satisfaction and
customer loyalty on customer retention. The results indicate that all
aspects of the customer value have positive relationships with customer
satisfaction but only emotional value has a positive and direct
relationship with customer loyalty. The study confirms that while none
of customer value aspects has direct and positive relationship with
customer retention, both customer satisfaction and customer loyalty
positively and directly affect customer retention.

During the past four decades, there have been tremendous changes on earth due to climate change. Humankind has increasingly used fossil fuels such as coal, oil, etc. and increased the green gas effect on this planet. Nowadays, most scientists believe there must be some actions to prevent global warming to rescue the next generation from the irreversible consequences of climate change. This paper studies the recent studies on the effects of global warming in Canada. The study reviews the recent efforts on the effects of global warming on forests, lakes, etc.

During the past few years, there have been tremendous changes on social media through different applications in Canada. Many people choose their products and services solely based on the tips they receive from various social media such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Social media are ex-periencing an increase popularity, both among the ordinary people who simply use the facilitated interaction, and businessman who observe it as a serious marketing facility. In this paper, we study the trend and usage of social media for different purposes in Canadian society. The survey indicates that Facebook has been the most popular followed by Twitter and LinkedIn. The study also indicates that social media are used for many purposes such as reaching update news, recommending products or services, recruiting employees, etc.

Measuring the relative efficiency of similar units has been an open research for years. Data en-velopment analysis (DEA) has been widely used among researchers for efficiency measurement. DEA uses different inputs/outputs to measure the relative efficiency of one unit compared with other similar units. This paper presents a comprehensive review on recent applications of DEA techniques on measuring the relative efficiency of project management units. The study covers the implementation of DEA method for measuring the relative efficiency of enterprise resources planning, research and development and construction projects.

In today’s environment, cash conversion cycle is randomly used as a measure of liquidity of the organizations. Cash conversion cycle is considered as the length of time between raw-materials and collection of cash from debtors. It can be used as a benchmarking competitors or comparing companies. On the other hand, Cash holding is one of the most important financial decisions that a manager has to make in any organization. Some organizations hold more cash and some organizations hold less cash. In this study, we perform a survey to make a relationship between Cash Conversion Cycle and Cash Holding.

Collide of two objects or impact, is one of the main damage initiation reasons. In this paper, impact and damage behavior of elastic and visco-elastic bodies are investigated numerically using the finite element analyses. The results showed that visco-elastic materials, distribute stresses to the edge of model after the impact with a solid body. Furthermore, the impact of elastic and visco-elastic composite materials are analyzed and the variations of stress, displacement, damage energy and the damage patterns during a time period are compared for the two material models. The reduction in the values of stress, displacement and damage energy of visco-elastic material is also determined relative to the elastic composite material.

With an ongoing progress in industries and technologies, most firms and businesses highly depend on cooperation and collaborations within a supply chain. In today’s competitive business environment, customer satisfaction plays an important role for the business survival. These matters can be secured by “supply chain”, a chain consists of various companies working together to maintain customers’ satisfaction. If various stages of different chains cooperate with each other, “supply chain network” (SCN) will be the outcome. In order to have a supply chain network or just a supply chain-operation in its best possible way, some optimization techniques are needed. In this paper, we present a close look at previous studies in the field of SCN optimization techniques and classify them based on the relative important characteristics.

Consider a chain as leader that wants to open p new facilities in a linear market, like metro. In this market, there is a competitor, called follower. The leader and the follower have established some facilities in advance. When the leader opens p new facilities, its competitor, follower, reacts the leader’s action and opens r new facilities. The optimal locations for leader and follower are chosen among predefined potential locations. Demand is considered as demand points and is assumed inelastic. Considering huff model, demand points are probabilistically absorbed by all facilities. The leader’s objective is maximization of its market share after opening follower’s new facilities. For solving leader problem, first the follower’s problem is solved for all leader’s potential locations and the best location for leader is obtained and then, a heuristic model is proposed for leader problem when the leader and the follower want to open one new facility. Computational results show that the proposed method is efficient for large scale problems.

During the past two decades, there have been increasing interests on permutation flow shop with different types of objective functions such as minimizing the makespan, the weighted mean flow-time etc. The permutation flow shop is formulated as a mixed integer programming and it is classified as NP-Hard problem. Therefore, a direct solution is not available and meta-heuristic approaches need to be used to find the near-optimal solutions. In this paper, we present a new discrete firefly meta-heuristic to minimize the makespan for the permutation flow shop scheduling problem. The results of implementation of the proposed method are compared with other existing ant colony optimization technique. The preliminary results indicate that the new proposed method performs better than the ant colony for some well known benchmark problems.

Novel 4-(1-(4-(4-(4-aminophenyl)-1H-pyrazol-1-yl)-6-(4-(diethylamino)phenyl)-1,3,5-triazin-2-yl)-1H-pyrazol-4-yl)benzenamine fluorescent dye was synthesized by multistep synthesis from cyanuric chloride and phenyl acetonitrile. It has absorption at 360 nm with single emission at 497 nm having fairly good quantum yield (0.379). The intermediates and the dye were characterized by FT-IR, 1H NMR, 13C NMR and Mass spectral analysis. Its utility as biocompatible fluorescent dye was explained by conjugation with bovine serum albumin. The method is based on direct fluorescence detection of fluorophore labelled protein before and after conjugation. Purified fluorescent conjugates were subsequently analyzed by fluorimetry. The analysis showed that the tested conjugation reaction yielded fluorescent conjugates of the dye through carbodiimide chemistry.