One of the most important questions in outsourcing management is to decide on the allocation of the activities, processes or services either from the inside or from the outside of the organizations through outsourcing operations. It is necessary to determine the factors influencing outsourcing decision making as well as their impacts on decisions. In this paper, the existing approaches and models and their related criteria are studied and the necessary criteria are explored based on different conditions in marine manufacturing industries. These criteria are categorized in four dimensions; namely Capacity, Technology, Strategy and financial, and Risk called CTSR. After determining the weights of the criteria based on paired-wise comparisons, the related calculations are carried out using PROMETHEE method. Finally, a Black, White, Gray (BWG) analysis is executed to determine whether a candidate should be outsourced or not.

Project stakeholder management deals with managing and fulfilling stakeholder expec-tations and has tended to focus on the stakeholders of the organization or the project viewpoint. The thematic, spatial and temporal objects of the research were to analyze the stakeholders and projects portfolio determination based on key stakeholders of a public university in Iran in 2019. In first step, stakeholders are identified. There are 12 stakeholder groups involved the university under study. In the second step using the power/interest matrix, stakeholder categorization and positioning was performed. In the following, a mathematical model for optimizing the portfolio of projects was presented and solved. This model was developed to maximize college profit while simultaneously considering the expectations and the requirements of four key stakeholders - the board of trustees, faculty members, researchers and the Ministry of Science. These findings may mainly reflect the strategic decisions at the university.

Root cause failure analysis (RCFA) is a structured process to acknowledge cause and effect relationship of failure or unfavorable events in the organization in order to prevent repetition or reduction of failures. There are various tools for RCFA like interviewing, fault tree analysis (FTA), 5 whys, failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), Pareto analysis and storytelling method with different strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, an integrated process model is developed using Reality Charting, FMEA and DEMATEL to understand and implement RCFA effectively. The proposed process model has eight main steps. The presented model in a case study for the UTD-20 engine is implemented and thus, in addition to the use of supporting research in model development, real data as well as the approval of the UTD-20 analysis team members are assisted to validate the proposed model.

Outsourcing is a common practice among the organizations and it is a major element in business strategy. It has recognized as an area of strategic importance. This article represents the application of the DMAIC Six Sigma approach to improve outsourcing management process with an emphasis to reduce delay of delivery time for a manufacturing company. The paper identifies each stage of the DMAIC cycle and the Six Sigma tools that were applied. The improvement project has been implemented in seven months.

Distribution refers to the steps taken to move and store a product from the suppliers to a customers in the supply chain and is a key driver of the overall profitability of a firm and overall supply chain. In this paper, a problem regarding managing of the move and store of goods are articulated and a mathematical model is presented to solve the model. The objective function is the total costs of distribution network, including transportation, storage rental, general warehousing, goods damages due to the transportation and storage, procurement, packing, and finally loading and unloading costs. The cost components described are defined based on the assumptions for a real distribution network of a chain stores firm. The aim of developing such a model is to find the optimum pattern to move and store goods based on the minimum cost of the distribution network.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is founded based on the value exchange between organization and customers and focuses merely on the value created in this connection. In this paper, the critical success factors are identified for a proper and effective implementation of CRM for an oil distribution company. The proposed survey of this paper identifies some important factors affecting the CRM implementation and determines the most important ones using a survey. The results indicate that there are twelve factors playing the most important roles on the success of CRM. There are CRM strategy, knowledge management in customer relationship, CRM technology, effective strategic committee, management of customer contact channels, customer information management, customer-oriented change management, training programs, strategic communication with staff, staff commitment, integration, and sectional implementation. We categorize the factors into two levels based on the level of their importance. The first level consists of the most important ones include only four items and the other eight items are categorized in level 2.

One of the primary managerial decisions for manufacturing units is to find out which activity must be outsourced. A good outsourcing decision is normally involved with different criteria such as core competencies, cost, technology and relative capability, risk, etc. In this paper, we present a multi criteria decision-making method to find a suitable solution for outsourcing activities called preference ranking organization method for enrichment evaluations (PROMETHEE). The proposed model of this paper uses fuzzy numbers to determine the relative importance of different criteria and it is implemented for a real-world case study of aerospace industry.