Cement is the single most important and profitable product in the building material sector. With the economic boom, in India, Indian cement industry is a market of opportunities waiting to be tapped. However, at the same time cement industry is also experiencing a surge in demand. Production of Cement will always release carbon dioxide and change in the climate of the earth that is why despite its profitability, the cement industry faces many challenges regarding environmental concerns and sustainability issues. In order to minimize the impact of all of the above mentioned issues, it is clear that the cement and construction industry will have to adapt to remain sustainable and in this process a number of innovative and new practices have to be adopted. The objective of this paper is to analyze the gap between the existing reporting practices and level of disclosure desired by stakeholders of cement companies and to identify the areas under which Indian Cement companies can report accounting information in sustainable way. Furthermore it is also required to align the reporting is as per stakeholder’s requirement. The accounting areas of reporting will be explored so that the requirements of reporting in terms of financial character can be filled in. This may lead to change in the practices under which the current financial statement provides financial information of sustainable activity as non-financial activity and its cost has been shown in the miscellaneous expenditure.

In recent years, death toll of natural and man-made disasters has increased at an appalling rate. Thus, disaster management and especially efficient management of humanitarian relief efforts seem to be essential. This paper presents a bi-objective mixed-integer mathematical model for Humanitarian Relief Logistics (HRL) operations planning, as an important part of the humanitarian relief efforts. This model determines optimal policies including location of warehouses, quantity of emergency relief items that should be held at each warehouse, and distribution plan to provide an emergency response pre-positioning strategy for disasters by considering two objectives. The first one minimizes the average response time and the second one minimizes the total operational cost including the fixed cost of establishing warehouses, the holding cost of unused supplies and the penalty cost of unsatisfied demand. The survival of pre-positioned supplies, demand amount and routes condition following an event are considered under uncertainty in the model solved by a robust scenario-based approach. The robust approach is applied to reduce the effects of fluctuations of the uncertain parameters with regards to all the possible future scenarios. The research demonstrates the applicability and usefulness of the proposed model on a case study on earthquake preparation in the Seattle area in USA. In addition, the work applies the Reservation Level Tchebycheff Procedure (RLTP) method to solve the bi-objective model in an interactive way with decision maker. This work provides practitioners, specifically planning teams, with a new approach to assist with disaster preparedness and to improve their logistics decisions.

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is the wireless non-contact implementation of radio-frequency electromagnetic fields to transfer necessary data to identify and to track tags attached to objects, automatically. RFID has been successfully used for supply chain management (SCM) problems in order to reduce errors associated with inventory. This paper uses RFID technique in five different scenarios of labeling, errors in stolen parts, waste, wrong replacement and delivery. The study uses simulation technique based on Enterprise Dynamics to analyze three parts in an auto industry. The study considers different criteria including inventory error estimation, profitability, profitability, customer satisfaction and SCM performance. The preliminary results indicate that the proposed method is capable of optimizing most objectives, significantly.

This paper presents an investigation on the role of packaging design on persuading consumer to buy different products in city of Tehran, Iran. The proposed study designs a questionnaire in Likert scale consists of 26 questions, distributes it among some Iranian experts and analyzes it based on principal component analysis. During the survey, the number of questions is reduced from 26to 23. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.88 and Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy and Approx. Chi-Square are 0.80 and 1880, respectively. Based on the results of our survey, we have derived five factors including requirement attributes, proportionality components, consumer choice, product appearance attractiveness and consumer characteristics.

One of the methods to reach continuous improvement on economy is to boost export and target international market. However, there are some limits on available resources, which present most developing countries for improvement of export activities. One way to overcome such trouble is to use foreign direct investment but this may happen only when we could determine major barriers and overcome the challenges. The present study presents an empirical investigation to detect important barriers on foreign direct investment in Iranian industries. The proposed study uses structural equation modeling to detect major barriers for export development. The results of our survey indicate that there were four factors including economic factors, feasibility study, infrastructure for investment and investment resources influencing on foreign direct investment.