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.

Leaf springs in vehicles are used to absorb, store and release energy. During this cycle stresses induced in the springs must not exceed design stress, in order to avoid settling or premature failure. Number of experiments are done in order to determine the stresses, load rate and deflection, which involves lot of time and cost. Today, the technologies in leaf springs are changing gradually; therefore new tools are required to keep aligned with worldwide technological requirements. The work presented in this paper provides a CAE solution to static analysis of 65Si7 leaf springs used in light commercial vehicles (LCV’s). A practical model of leaf spring used in LCV has been taken into consideration for this study. It has been experimentally tested for deflection, stress and load rate on a full scale leaf spring testing machine. A static structural CAE analysis of leaf spring has been done under similar loading condition. The CAD model of the leaf spring has been prepared in solid works and analyzed using ANSYS. Using CAE tools, ideal type of contact and meshing elements have been proposed to achieve results closer to the experimental results. The analytical method for static analysis of the leaf springs has also been described. CAE results have been compared with experimental and analytical results for validation.

For today’s high competitive market, when immensity purchasing of inventory becomes convenient or obligatory, to discover an alternative market in order to maximize the revenue earned is a tradition. In this paper, we considered an inventory model for seasonal products with Weibull rate of deterioration having two potential markets, say, primary and alternate. To handle the inventory up to the next season will result an increase in total cost. So it is a favorable task to transfer the remaining stock to the alternate market even at a slightly differ in selling price. Solution procedure, numerical examples and sensitivity analysis for different variables are presented to illustrate the model.

This paper presents a supply chain management by considering efficiency in the system. The proposed study considers two objective functions where the first one maximizes the efficiency of the supply chain and the second one minimizes the cost of facility layout as well as production of different products. In order to measure the relative efficiency, the study uses the method developed by Klimberg and Ratick (2008) [Klimberg, R. K., & Ratick, S. J. (2008). Modeling data envelopment analysis (DEA) efficient location/allocation decisions. Computers & Operations Research, 35(2), 457-474.]. The study has been formulated as a mixed integer programming and the implementation of the proposed model has been demonstrated using some numerical example. The preliminary results indicate that it was possible to increase the efficiency of supply chain without increase the supply chain expenses.

Cash is the life blood of the organizations and cash management is the important aspect of any organization. Corporate cash management boosts the companies from small to giant in the competitive environment. In this study we highlight three factors of a good cash management practices. Such factors are Cash Conversion Cycle (CCC), cash holding and credit score. Influence of one factor to other helps organizations manage their corporate cash in better way. In this study, we collect data from Capitaline corporate database of Mumbai, India over the period 2002-2011. Using some regression techniques, we observe that due to higher credit score companies forced to minimize their CCC and it helped to maintain lower level of working capital.

Nowadays, the importance of achieving sustainable organization with competitive advantage in complex environments has many researchers’ interest. So, in this study, we evaluate different views of MKM and its role to reach SCA within banking industry. This research is relatively the scarce empirical study and adds to its originality. The findings offer valuable insights on the generalizability of MKM in a research setting. In fact, the purpose of this study is to empirically test the effect of the marketing knowledge management (MKM) on sustainable competitive advantage (SCA) within banking industry of Iran. A valid research instrument was utilized to conduct a survey of 150 top- and middle-level managers from Mellat bank of Iran (MBI). With a response rate of 81.3 percent, 122 questionnaires were returned; the number of valid and usable questionnaires was 101. Using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, MKM were classified into organizational strategies, culture and performance of senior manager, information technology (IT), research and development (R & D), internal customer (personnel), and external customer (client). Moreover, MBI’ SCA was classified into three dimensions: market, customer, finance. Structural equation modelling was utilized to test the stated hypotheses and model. Statistical support was found for the hypothesized relationships. Moreover it has been shown that MKM maintained the greatest effect on the market centered SCA, while it had the least influence on the customer centered.

Activity-based costing (ABC) is a method, which identifies activities in a firm and assigns the expenses of each activity with resources to all products and services based on the real consumption by each. This method allocates more overhead costs into direct expenses compared with conventional method. ABC method is normally used for costing as well as monitoring different activities, which involves tracing resource consumption. This paper presents a survey on advances of ABC based method. The study has discussed the advantages and disadvantages of the implementation of ABC based method in different industries. The survey also discusses recent advances on time driven ABC method in health care industries.

The telecommunications industry continues to experience fierce competition due to the growth in subscribers and the rapid development of new technologies in the sector. With that hindsight, this study explores the dimensionality of factors that affect mobile phone subscribers’ intention to switch operators. Survey data was collected from 235 mobile phone network subscribers and analyzed using the Partial Least Square Approach to Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). The SEM model was assessed based on the measurement model and the structural model. Factor Loadings, Cross Loadings, Average Variance Extracted Cronbach’s alpha, and Composite reliabilities of the latent variables examined showed that the measurement model exhibited sufficient reliability, discriminant validity and convergent validity. Assessment of the Structural model shows that 77% of the variation in Satisfaction is explained by our model (R2 = 0.77). Furthermore, 18% (R2 = 0.18) of the variation in Intention to Switch was explained by the model. Stone-Geiser Q2 for the endogenous showed that the proposed Structural Equation Model exhibited sufficient predictive relevance. Conclusions were drawn with practical implications of the results also discussed.

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.

This paper examines the determinants of banks’ performance in emerging economies. Sustainable growth of emerging economies depends on the financial performance of their banks’. The determinants of banks’ performance are, therefore, analyzed through panel econometric techniques over the crisis period of 2008-2014 using data of the top 50 banks from the 10 sampled emerging economies. Both banks’ specific and macroeconomic variables are considered in the analysis. Results reveal that macroeconomic variables like GDP and inflation are significant forces behind high Return on Assets (ROA) in emerging economies banks’, however, both negatively influenced the Net Interest Margins (NIM). Among the banks’ specific variables high profitability and NIM are related to high operating costs. This shows that expenses are managed properly in these economies. Further, leverage has a positive impact on both (ROA) and (NIM).While reserve requirement has negatively and significantly influence both profitability and net interest margins, which indicates the prominence of central bank’s monetary policy by considering the importance of liquidity for emerging economies commercial banks in economic recovery phase.