The wear of cutting tools remains a major obstacle. The effects of wear are not only antagonistic at the lifespan and productivity, but also harmful with the surface quality. The present work deals with some machinability studies on flank wear, surface roughness, and lifespan in finish turning of AISI 304 stainless steel using multilayer Ti(C,N)/Al2O3/TiN coated carbide inserts. The machining experiments are conducted based on the response surface methodology (RSM). Combined effects of three cutting parameters, namely cutting speed, feed rate and cutting time on the two performance outputs (i.e. VB and Ra), and combined effects of two cutting parameters, namely cutting speed and feed rate on lifespan (T), are explored employing the analysis of variance (ANOVA). The relationship between the variables and the technological parameters is determined using a quadratic regression model and optimal cutting conditions for each performance level are established through desirability function approach (DFA) optimization. The results show that the flank wear is influenced principally by the cutting time and in the second level by the cutting speed. In addition, it is indicated that the cutting time is the dominant factor affecting workpiece surface roughness followed by feed rate, while lifespan is influenced by cutting speed. The optimum level of input parameters for composite desirability was found Vc1-f1-t1 for VB, Ra and Vc1-f1 for T, with a maximum percentage of error 6.38%.

Evaluating research productivity of lecturer is a vital process of universities for teaching improvement and administrative decision making. Lecturers’ research productivity evaluation is a difficult and sensitive problem which has many objective and subjective criteria, complexity and imprecision. Therefore, the evaluation of lecturers’ research productivity can be viewed as a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem in vague environment. This study develops an integrated MCDM approach for evaluating the lecturers’ research productivity. In the proposed approach, a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is applied to determine the weights of criteria. A Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method using interval neutrosophic sets is further adopted for showing the preference order of the lecturers’ research productivity in an educational organization. Finally, the proposed approach is applied to solve the lecturers’ research productivity evaluation problem in the case of University of Economics and Business, Vietnam National University, Hanoi (UEB-VNU).

Nowadays, there is a growing attention on export activities and they are considered as a good strategy for companies to grow from supportive domestic sales to foreign developing markets, while offering greater flexibility, cost, and lowering different risks compared to other external development methods. With the internationalization of the global economy, the focus has been on improving export performance, which reflects the company's success in the economic field. An important point about Iran's exports, which should not be overlooked, is the decline on the reliance of the national economy on revenues from oil exports and the achievement of economic independence. Therefore, support for the export industries, especially non-oil exports, is one of Iranian priorities for increasing economic growth and creating foreign exchange earnings. In the meantime, the economic performance of pharmaceutical companies is very important because the growth and development of this sector and the export of these products bring significant foreign exchange earnings. This paper focuses on the data gathered from the managers and exporters of the pharmaceutical companies and using some statistical tests to determine the effective components on export promotion. The study considers 18 factors and extracts five important factors including profitability and economic growth, developmental quality, encouragement and financial performance. The study also uses analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and DEMATEL techniques to rank these factors and their sub-components. Quality is considered as the most important factor according to the implementation of AHP and profitability and economic growth are determined to be the most influencing factors according to DEMATEL.

In every nation's Green Growth Strategy, enterprise's green investment plays a vital role for sustainable development. In order to develop green investment activity for sustainable development, it is necessary to identify factors affecting green finance and sustainable development of businesses. This study identifies and measures the factors affecting green investment in Vietnamese using the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) methodology to process the dataset from 208 businesses in different industries in 2018.The results show that most of the factors, which were included in the survey, were reliable, maintained statistical significance, and converged into the group of factors. The factors in the survey includes Infrastructure for green investment, Difficulties in approaching funding for green investment activities, Incentives to access capital for green investment, Understanding of enterprises' green investment, Support from the Government in accessing to fund for green investment, The capital that businesses can access for green investment, The enterprise plans to implement green investment projects actively and the special incentives of green investment. Notably, the group of factors about green investment awareness, awareness on accessing green capital, the role of the Government, and green capital mobilization tools had substantial impacts on the green investment implementation of Vietnamese businesses. On that basis, the proposed recommendations focus on the central role of the Government, the legal framework, the diversification of green financing, and green capital mobilization tools. Raising awareness of businesses in accessing and using these capital raising tools as well as promoting green investment communication are solutions according to the evaluation of more than 200 surveyed enterprises.

The UAE diversification strategy of the economy focuses on reducing the dependence of country GDP on oil. As a result, the healthcare sector has significantly transformed from total dependence on government health facilities and support to the involvement of the private sector as an essential partner in covering the health needs of the UAE population. In this emerging competitive market, the leaders of both public and private healthcare sectors work on several strategies to improve the effectiveness and the competitiveness of their organizations. Literature shows that nearly 50% of the hospital's expenses are directed to cover employees' salaries. On the other hands, skilled employees' salaries are increasing day by day. Thus, we believe that hospitals should deal smartly with this debate by ensuring using maximum manpower resources. In this study, we present a nursing project that adopted Fredrick Taylor concepts and used the Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing (TDABC) methodology to calculate costs and compare its outcome to the currently imple-mented Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) system in the outpatient unit at Tawam Hospital. The study findings have confirmed that TDABC can be implemented successfully and make a difference in human resources management of nurses at the unit level. The authors have recommended rolling out the study to inpatient nursing units.

This paper focuses on the problem of scheduling and routing workers in a courier service to deliver packages for a set of geographically distributed customers and, on a specific date and time window. The crew of workers has a limited capacity and a time window that represents their labor length. The problem deals with a combination of multiples variants of the vehicle routing problem as capacity, multiple periods, time windows, due dates and distance as constraints. Since in the courier services the demands could be of hundreds or thousands of packages to be delivered, the problem is computationally unmanageable. We present a three-phase solution approach. In the first phase, a scheduling model determines the visit date for each customer in the planning horizon by considering the release date, due date to visit and travel times. We use an expert system based on the know-how of the courier service, which uses an inference engine that works as a rule interpreter. In the second phase, a clustering model assigns, for each period, customers to workers according to the travel times, maximum load capacity and customer’s time windows. We use a centroid based and sweep algorithms to solve the resulted problem. Finally, in the third phase, a routing model finds the order in which each worker will visit all customers taking into account their time windows and worker’s available time. To solve the routing problem we use an Ant Colony Optimization metaheuristic. We present some numerical results using a case study, in which the proposed method of this paper finds better results in comparison with the current method used in the case study.

The primary objective of the study is to investigate the mediating role of authentic leadership between employee training and employee performance in Jeddah Islamic Port of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia based on the complementary congruity theory (CCT). The study is based on analyzing 212 respondents from Jeddah Islamic Port employees. The present study uses the smartPLS 3.2.8 statistical software to reach a positive and significant relationship between employee training, authentic leadership and employee performance. Furthermore, the study finds a mediating role of authentic leadership between the relationship of employee training and employee performance in Jeddah Islamic Port. The study also recommends that the port management should focus on employee training and authentic leadership practices to enhance the employee performance which lead to port performance. Moreover, the study suggests that future study should validate the current study framework in other countries especially in the context of government departments.

This study considers representing decision maker preferences by Choquet integral in existence of interactions among criteria. Parameters of the Choquet integral are capacities which assign weights not only to criteria but also to each subset of criteria. This property provides Choquet integral with the ability of modeling some types of interactions. Different capacity types with different degrees of complexity have been defined in the literature. After making a review on the dependence (interaction) and independence concepts used in the multiple criteria decision making literature, we study and represent structures of interactions that can be handled by different capacity types through intuitive graphical demonstrations. Afterwards, we provide guidelines for specifying the appropriate capacity type in practical applications. Such guidance has not been provided in the literature for the practitioners to the best of our knowledge.

Like freedom of India, the demonetization reform was also unveiled in India during the midnight by the Indian Government and it was declared that one thousand and five hundred rupee notes would no longer be legal tender effective from 8th November 2016. At the same time, the Reserve Bank of India issued new two thousand rupee notes and new five hundred rupee notes on November, 10, 2016. This initiative was taken by the Central Government with the aim of preventing corruption, reducing black money and counterfeit currency notes. There was a significant impact on the entire Indian economy system and it was urged the citizens to switch to alternative modes of payment due to non-availability of hot currency i.e., e-payments, hence people faced many problems in all transactions after demonetization especially in service sectors. This paper performs a questionnaire based survey by collecting the necessary data from 629 beneficiaries/customers of service sector organisations in Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu state, India during November-December 2017 to measure the effects of demonetization after a year. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (Structural Equations Model) was used to analyse the relationship between the effect, sustainability and the impact on the customer satisfaction. The study found that demonetization based on Adoptability, Implementation, Readiness and Acceptance of new payment methods significantly influenced the customer satisfaction under service sector. The effects of different factors such as Approach, Availability, Time, Delivery and Infrastructure also had significant contribution towards the customers’ satisfaction.

This paper studies the problem of scheduling a finite set of customers with stochastic service times for a single-server system. The objective is to minimize the waiting time of customers, the idle time of the server, and the lateness of the schedule. Because of the NP-hardness of the problem, the optimal schedule is notoriously hard to derive with reasonable computation times. Therefore, we develop a simulation based K-steps look-ahead selection method which can result in nearly optimal schedules within reasonable computation times. Furthermore, we study the different distributed service times, e.g., Exponential, Weibull and lognormal distribution and the results show that the proposed algorithm can obtain better results than the lag order approximation method proposed by Vink et al. (2015) [Vink, W., Kuiper, A., Kemper, B., & Bhulai, S. (2015). Optimal appointment scheduling in continuous time: The lag order approximation method. European Journal of Operational Research, 240(1), 213-219.]. Finally, a realistic appointment scheduling includes experiments to verify the good performance of the proposed method.