Nowadays electronic commerce plays an important role in many business activities, operations, and transaction processing. The recent advances on e-businesses have created tremendous opportunities to increase profitability. This paper presents a multi-objective marketing planning model which simultaneously determines efficient marketing expenditure, service cost and product & apos; s selling price in two competitive markets. To solve the proposed model, we discuss a multi-objective geometric programming (GP) approach based on compromise programming method. Since our proposed model is a signomial GP and global optimality is not guaranteed for the problem, we transform the model to posynomial form. Finally, the solution procedure is illustrated via a numerical example and a sensitivity analysis is presented.

This paper presents a new mathematical model to select an optimal combination of productivity improvement techniques. The proposed model of this paper considers four-stage cycle productivity and the productivity is assumed to be a linear function of fifty four improvement techniques. The proposed model of this paper is implemented for a real-world case study of manufacturing plant. The resulted problem is formulated as a mixed integer programming which can be solved for optimality using traditional methods. The preliminary results of the implementation of the proposed model of this paper indicate that the productivity can be improved through a change on equipments and it can be easily applied for both manufacturing and service industries.

One of the most important issues on educational systems is to measure the relative efficiency of similar units based on non-financial factors. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) has become popular among many who wish to rank educational systems using different factors such as the rate of educational success or the number of employees, etc. However, one of the main concerns on implementing DEA methods is the uncertainty involved in input/output parameters. In this paper, a robust data envelopment analysis (RDEA) is developed to measure the efficiency of high schools considering uncertainty on output parameters. We present an empirical study on a set of high schools located in Tehran, which is the capital city of Iran. The study uses uncertain data for input/output information and the results are compared with an existing parametric stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). The preliminary results indicate that the robust DEA approach is relatively a reliable method for efficiency estimating.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is essentially a commercial software package that enables the integration of transaction - oriented data and business processes throughout an organization. In order to remain competitive in this global business scenario, the small and medium scale enterprises (SMEs) are opting for ERP implementation. In Indian SME sector, the adoption of ERP is rapidly increasing. Literature shows many instances where organizations, even after implementing such novel information systems like ERP, are unable to derive the benefits of integration. It is, therefore, not surprising that implementation of enterprise information systems in general is quite difficult due to their size, scope and complexity. Therefore, there is a need to identify some issues that would lead to positive outcome for the implementation of ERP systems in the context of Indian SME sector. This paper thus attempts to identify and to prioritize the factors influencing proper implementation of ERP systems in a business organization particularly for Indian small and medium businesses (SMBs). The research presented here is specifically targeted the Indian SMEs, which have already completed the process of implementing ERP system.

During the past few decades, many organizations have attempted to increase their productivity
through outsourcing parts of their responsibilities. Outsourcing helps firms reduce their low
value added activities and focus on their high value added activities. It also helps organization
save their time and energy which leads to more efficient units. The idea of outsourcing is more
important for project based organizations where the nature of works is different from a
particular project to another one. This paper presents an integrated balanced score card system
with an adaptation of ELECTRE III method to select suitable resources for outsourcing. The
proposed model of the paper is implemented for a case study of subway system in Iran and the
results are discussed.

This paper proposes the social network analysis (SNA), to study interaction among various
activities in a product development process (PDP). The implementation of SNA helps to
measure the properties of information flow and identifies PDP activities and limitations. The
findings of an exploratory research project which explores the potential of SNA, as an improve
tool for visually mapping and analyzing the stakeholders relationships found across the IC
substrates design/manufacturing’s PDP of the Unimicron Technology Corp. From the findings,
the authors prescribe the necessary SNA recommendations to improve the social conditions
within the PDP.

In this paper, a bi-objective mathematical model for emergency services location-allocation
problem on a tree network considering maximum distance constraint is presented. The first
objective function called centdian is a weighted mean of a minisum and a minimax criterion
and the second one is a maximal covering criterion. For the solution of the bi-objective
optimization problem, the problem is split in two sub problems: the selection of the best set of
locations, and a demand assignment problem to evaluate each selection of locations. We
propose a heuristic algorithm to characterize the efficient location point set on the network.
Finally, some numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed
algorithm.

One of the most important issues on quality of building structure is its resistance against
earthquake. Earthquake, as one of natural disasters, has been one of the main reasons of fatal
incidents in developing countries. Any attempt to increase the quality of building structure
could reduce any possible damages an earthquake could cause on society. This paper presents a
system dynamic model to study the importance and behavior of the factors which affect the
construction quality of buildings & apos; structures. The proposed model of this paper is analyzed for a
case study and the results are discussed. The paper also uses DEMATEL technique to compare
the results of the proposed method. The paper concludes that among the whole factors which
affect the construction quality of buildings & apos; structures, the "performance of related
organizations and institutions" is of the most important ones.

One of the primary issues on marketing planning is to know the customer & apos; s behavioral trends. A
customer & apos; s purchasing interest may fluctuate for different reasons and it is important to find the
declining or increasing trends whenever they happen. It is important to study these fluctuations
to improve customer relationships. There are different methods to increase the customer & apos; s
willingness such as planning good promotions, an increase on advertisement, etc. This paper
proposes a new methodology to measure customer & apos; s behavioral trends called customer
electrocardiogram. The proposed model of this paper uses K-means clustering method with
RFM analysis to study customer & apos; s fluctuations over different time frames. We also apply the
proposed electrocardiogram methodology for a real-world case study of food industry and the
results are discussed in details

Supply chain management (SCM) is becoming critical as firms recognize that competition is
shifting from company versus company to supply chain versus supply chain. In the present
competitive scenario, the fierce competition has driven most companies to seek for means of
enhancing performance beyond their four wall boundaries. The firm’s ability in collaborating
with its upstream and downstream partners determines its success in attaining better
performance with supply chain collaboration; a firm is able to serve fragmented markets in
which end customers require more product varieties and availability with shorter product life
cycle and, at the same time, lower supply chain costs. This paper introduces the framework of
continuous supply chain collaboration (CSCC), which extends the traditional frame of reference
in strategic sourcing from a supplier centric to a supply-chain-scope as continuous
improvement efforts to enhance the customer satisfaction. CSCC practices are rather
exceptional, yet CSCC is believed to be the single most comprehensive framework for attaining
operational excellence.