Polyester short cut fiber is a textile industry which is rarely explored or researched. This research explains the necessary steps of improvement using Six Sigma method to reduce the nonconform-ing products in a polyester short cut fiber manufacturing in Indonesia. An increased noncon-forming products in the shortcut fiber production process created some quality problems from January to May, 2015. Define, measure, analysis, improve, control (DMAIC) steps were im-plemented to determine root cause of the problems and to improve production process using sta-tistical approach. The results of Six Sigma improvement has indicated that the process capability was increased from 2.2 to 3.1 sigma, savings $18,394.2 USD per-month.

Using advanced technology in business has created hyper-competition among organizations to satisfy customers' needs. Using advanced technology aims to provide customers with quality products/services at suitable prices in the right place better than competitors. Therefore, the current study's purpose is to explore the influence of cloud computing services on Jordanian commercial organizations’ competitive advantages, organizations which use cloud computing services. The study uses quantitative, cause-effect, and cross-sectional methods and uses a convenience sampling approach to collect the data by questionnaire from 111 managers and/or owners of commercial organizations. The collected questionnaires are examined and inserted into SPSS. The instrument validity, normal distribution, and reliability are verified, then descriptive analysis is performed, the relationship between independent and dependent variables is tested, and finally multiple regressions are used to test the hypotheses. The findings indicate that commercial organizations are concerned about cloud computing services as well as competitive advantage sub-variables. The results also show that there was a significantly strong correlation between cloud computing services and competitive advantage. Moreover, cloud computing services influence the dimensions of competitive advantages (quality, cost, reliability, innovation, and responsiveness) of commercial organizations, where cloud computing services have the most significant influence on quality followed by cost and responsiveness, respectively. However, cloud computing services do not significantly influence innovation and reliability. Finally, the study recommends doing comparable research on other sectors, and industries as well as in other countries to test the results' generalizability.

The development of techniques that allow producing high-finish surfaces of geometrically-complex parts of difficult-to-machine materials by electrical discharge machining (EDM) is an emerging research area. The aim of this work is to study the application of electrolytic-plasma polishing technique for the high-quality surface finish of the parts obtained by EDM process. The structural alloy steel 38KH2N2MA (GOST 4543 – 71) was selected as the processing material. The morphology of the machined surface was examined using optical micrographs. It was observed that applying the electrolytic plasma polishing for the duration of 5 minutes results in reducing the surface roughness of the ED machined surface by a factor of 5. It is also concluded that the combined action of EDM with electrolytic plasma polishing method is suitable for attaining the desired surface finish.

It is critical to safeguard confidential data, especially secret and private messages. This study introduces a novel data cryptography approach. The new approach will be capable of encrypting and decrypting any communication size. The suggested approach will use a sophisticated private key with a convoluted structure. The private key will have 5 components with a double data type to prevent guessing or hacking. The confidential data will produce two secret keys, the first of which will be taken from the image key. These keys will be vulnerable to slight changes in private key information. To maximize the approach's efficiency, the suggested method will deal with lengthy messages by splitting them into chunks. On the other hand, the chaotic logistic map model will be used to create the second key. The suggested technique will be implemented, and several sorts of analysis (sensitivity, quality, security, and speed analysis) will be undertaken to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed method. The quality metrics MSE, PSNR, and CC will be computed to validate the suggested method's quality. To illustrate the efficiency of the proposed technique, encryption and decryption times will be measured, and cryptography throughputs will be determined. Various PKs will be tried throughout the decryption process to demonstrate how sensitive the produced outputs are to changes in the private key. The suggested approach will be tested, and the results will be compared to the results of existing methods to demonstrate the improvement offered by the proposed method.

This research is conducted to investigate the factors affecting the accounting information systems quality. Data was collected by using questionnaire delivered to 347 participants who are board of director’s members and managers. The statistical methods approaches are employed to address the research issues including Explanatory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS). The findings showed that various factors had significant impacts on the accounting information systems quality including (i) organization culture, (ii) manager participation, (iii) information technology, (iv) information technology knowledge of managers, (v) accounting knowledge of managers, (vi) accounting information applications, (vii) consultation of external experts and (viii) training activities for users in accounting information systems. Based on the research results, some key intuitive recommendations were proposed aiming to improve the accounting information systems quality of Vietnamese Enterprises.

This paper presents a survey to identify and rank the supply chain management factors influencing the quality of the products for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in food industry. The study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale and distributes it among 238 randomly selected managers of SMEs in food industry in city of Tehran, Iran. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.851, which is well above the acceptable level. Using principle component with Varimax rotation, the study has determined four important factors including strategic management, product management, manufacturing process management, organizational resources, customer orientation, industry capacity, which influence the most on product quality improvement.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to study the role of quality in supply chain management in development of brand equity. The study uses two questionnaires, one for measuring quality in supply chain adopted from Fynes et al. (2014) [Fynes, B., De Burca, S., & Marshall, D. (2004). Environmental uncertainty, supply chain relationship quality and performance. Journal of Purchasing and Supply Management, 10(4), 179-190.] and the other for measuring the brand equity, which was adopted from Buil et al. (2013) [Buil, I., De Chernatony, L., & Martínez, E. (2013). Examining the role of advertising and sales promotions in brand equity creation. Journal of Business Research, 66(1), 115-122.]. The survey has accomplished among auto part producers in Iran. The study selects 385 randomly selected people who were active in this industry. Using Spearman correlation ratio as well as Stepwise regression techniques, the study has concluded that there were positive and meaningful relationships between three supply chain factors, namely relationship, commitment and compatibility, and brand equity.

As there is still only limited research on students brand choice of mobile phones, the focus of this study was to ascertain drivers of tertiary students’ mobile phone brand choice in Ghana. Using a structured questionnaire, data was collected from a random sample of 840 students from three tertiary institutions in Ghana. The study revealed that the most significant determinant of the students brand choice of mobile phones was perceived quality (p & LT; 0.05). Although price, prestige, and promotion also influenced their choice of mobile phone these were not significant at the 0.05 level. The study further revealed that availability and mobile phones as gift items also influenced the brand of phone used by the students (p & GT; 0.05). The study concludes that in spite of their economic handicaps, students brand choice was driven most by perceived quality and not price. Recommendations on how information technology manufacturers’ particularly mobile phone companies and marketers can exploit these drivers to sustain and improve their brand equity among students have been made.

During the past few years, there have been increasing trend on building appropriate model for supplier selection and a good supplier, indeed, is capable of providing better quality products, which could lead to increase the productivity of an organization. In this paper, we present an empirical investigation to find the effect of monitoring three different standards, namely, domestic, national and international standard on improving the quality of products in water and sewage projects. The proposed model of this paper designs a questionnaire and distributes it among some experts in a rural Water & Sewage firm located in city of Ahvaz, Iran. Using the Pearson correlation ratio, the study examines three hypotheses of the survey and the results indicate that there were poor relationship between carefully considering domestic, national and international standards and improvement on quality of products offered by various suppliers. In addition, job experience and type of employment also do not seem to have any meaningful effect on quality assessment of suppliers.

The present study investigates the relationship between service quality and customer loyalty in one of Iranian banks in province of Golestan, Iran named Bank Melli Iran. The population of the study consists of all customers of this branch. Using Kersity-Morgan table and simple random sampling, a number of 384 customers were selected as the participants of the study. The method of research is descriptive-correlation with a survey design. SERVQUAL scale and a researcher-made questionnaire were used to examine service quality and customer loyalty, respectively. Pearson correlation formula was run to analyze the data. The results showed a significant relationship between different aspects of service quality and customer loyalty in this particular branch of bank.