Given the competitive environment in the global market in recent years, organizations need to plan for increased profitability and optimize their performance. Planning for an appropriate product mix plays essential role for the success of most production units. This paper applies analytical network process (ANP) approach for product mix planning for a part supplier in Iran. The proposed method uses four criteria including cost of production, sales figures, supply of raw materials and quality of products. In addition, the study proposes different set of products as alternatives for production planning. The preliminary results have indicated that that the proposed study of this paper could increase productivity, significantly.

During the past few years, there have been different changes in global market due to fast development of science and technology. These changes have increased competition among all existing companies and it has made it difficult for new rivals to gain market share. This paper tries to identify the opportunities and threats of technology transfer in one of world’s fastest growing gas development regions called Pars Special Economic Energy Zone. The proposed model of this paper first identify important factors influencing both opportunities as well as threats and then uses analytical hierarchy process to rank all factors. The results show that the threats were more important than the existing opportunities and among the most important threats, embargo and sales of oil were the most important ones.

One of the most important issues affecting profitability is to determine the impact of different factors influencing purchasing activities. In this paper, we perform an extensive literature survey to detect different purchasing factors influencing customers & apos; behavior. The factors are categorized in three different groups and they are ranked using analytical network process. The results of our survey indicate that three factors of personal, product and situational play important roles in purchasing impulse. The personal item includes different factors where demographic characteristic factors receive the highest ranking (35%) followed by other factors are feelings, excitement and fun, self identify, education and novelty. There are also three sub-factors associated with demographic characteristics including gender, age and race and the weights are 0.46748, 0.42668 and 0.10584, respectively, which means gender is the most important factor followed by age and race. Finally, the other factor is associated with situational factors & apos; group, which includes presence of others, culture, design of store, time available, local market condition, sales staff and self service with the relative importance of 0.04296, 0.08733, 0.12130, 0.22217, 0.05643, 0.15346 and 0.31635, respectively.

Clustering plays an important role on developing industries, since business units can take advantage of many existing industries for trouble shooting or sharing their experiences to increase efficiency. One of the primary concerns for developing clustering is to identify and remove important barriers. In this paper, we gather experts' feedbacks on forming clustering in Iran's industries and, using analytical network process, we prioritize the important factors and provide some necessary guidelines to develop clustering. The results of this paper indicate that the existence of a supplier network is the most important factor, followed by the existence of competition between operational units, existence of high-risk investors, existence of suitable infrastructures. There are also other less important criteria including the existence of flexibility, suitable technology and competition, governmental regularities, social background, trust, etc.