In today’s global scenario of intense competition and environmental uncertainty flexibility in supply chain has an important role to play for the existence of any supply chain business. A need to be responsive to the constantly changing market scenario and cater to the customer needs, a certain degree of flexibility is required, which requires the coordination of many plants to produce and deliver goods to customers located in different places, and suppliers, which provide each plant with the required components. This paper intends to measure the degree of flexibility required for a two stage supply chain and assessing both the supplier flexibility and the assembler flexibility. In this paper, nine configurations of the SC are considered resulting from the combination of the three degrees of supplier and manufacturer flexibility, i.e. no flexibility, limited flexibility and total flexibility, respectively. Simulation model representing the different flexibility configurations are evaluated and the performance of each configuration analyzed to determine the flexibility configuration suitable to a supply chain. In particular the performance analysis of lead time, work-in-process, service level and cost are measured to determine the suitable flexibility.

This study explores the role of organizational culture (OC) in the relationship between entrepre-neurial orientation (EO) and Bangladeshi small and medium enterprises (SMEs) performance. Their relationship obtains a substantial scholarly attention, however very few empirical studies have been conducted among Bangladeshi SMEs. Generally, SMEs contribute to the economy through employment generation, poverty reduction, innovation, social cohesion, and so on, which in turn contribute to the growth domestic product (GDP) of Bangladesh. Hence, SMEs are considered as a key reactor of economic growth in Bangladesh. Grounded on the literature and theoretical fact, a model was developed and intended to examine this relationship. A quantitative survey technique was exercised and the data were collected from the randomly selected 384 owners of SMEs in Dhaka–Bangladesh. The data were analyzed by using SEM-AMOS. Based on the statistical results, EO and OC were significantly related to SME performance and OC was found to mediate the relationship between EO and SME performance. This study will help entrepreneurs as well as policy makers make better decisions for maximizing SME performance through improving OC in the competitive global economy.

Teaching–Learning-Based Optimization (TLBO) is recently being used as a new, reliable, accurate and robust optimization technique scheme for global optimization over continuous spaces. This paper presents an improved variant of TLBO algorithm, called Improved Teaching–Learning-Based Optimization (ITLBO). A performance comparison of the proposed method is provided against the original TLBO and some other algorithms. The improved TLBO algorithm shows a marked improvement in performance over the traditional TLBO on several benchmark optimization problems.

Existing literature on lean principles reveals the impact of lean principles on the organizational performance. During the past few years, the Indian manufacturing context has been competing with the global competitors directly to sustain their presence. One of the big motivations behind this is the steps taken in favor of replacing the policies and regulations for the manufacturing context by the government of India. In present, the manufacturing context is still far away to get the sustainable market because of customer perception variation i.e. cost, delivery and quality re-lated issues. To overcome the uncertainties based on the attributes i.e. quality, productivity, de-livery etc., almost all the manufacturing units use the basic of lean principle i.e. apply the 5’S. Whereas the heavy industries used the VSM approach especially the automotive product manu-facturers. The work presented in this paper gives an insight on the application of lean principles in the manufacturing context and analyzes the impacts using ISM approach.

This research investigates the diversification-performance relationship in Nigerian banking industry. Empirical evidences emerging from previous studies from developed countries about the effect of diversification on performance in the banking industry have so far yielded mixed results. There is a major gap in the relevant literature on developing countries which this research filled by studying Nigerian banks and providing empirical evidence on diversification-performance relationship. Survey research design was adopted with the application of probability sampling technique in selecting our case study companies and respondents. Primary data were collected through questionnaire while secondary data were garnered from the annual report and accounts of the banks under study. Data were analyzed through descriptive statistics while correlation and ANOVA were used to test our hypotheses. It was discovered that diversification impacts corporate performance of these banks positively and recommends that these banks should engage in geographical diversification in addition to other forms of diversification they are currently involved in for maximum performance.