5S is a systematic technique used by organizations come from five Japanese words; Seiri (Sort), Seiton (Set in order), Seiso (Shine), Seiketsu(standardize) and Shitsuke (sustain). This system helps to organize a workplace for efficiency and decrease non value added activities and optimize quality and productivity through monitoring an organized environment. This paper aims to review previous studies about benefits of 5S Implementation and its efficiency in organizations. The results show that 5S is an effective tool for improvement of organizational performance, regardless of organization type, size, its production or its service. Consequently, 5S technique would strongly support the objectives of organization to achieve continuous improvement in performance and productivity.

This paper presents a study to investigate the effects of outsourcing logistics on improvement of export activities in minerals firms. The proposed study designs a questionnaire with 20 questions in Likert scale and distributes it among 67 firms out of 81 active organizations, which are responsible for exporting minerals in province of Tehran, Iran. Using structural equation modeling, the study has determined that there was a meaningful relationship between strategic orientations of exporters against outsourcing third part logistics (3PL) and basic and additional capabilities of 3PL. In addition, there was a meaningful relationship between basic capabilities of 3PL and competitive advantage of exporters but there was not any meaningful relationship between additional capabilities of 3PL and competitive advantage of exporters. Finally, there was a meaningful relationship between competitive advantage of exporters and performance of exports. In summary, the survey indicates that the outsourcing logistics influences positively on the performance of minerals firms.

This article addresses multi-level lot sizing and scheduling problem in capacitated, dynamic and deterministic cases of a job shop manufacturing system with sequence-dependent setup times and costs assumptions. A new mixed-integer programing (MIP) model with big bucket time approach is provided to the problem formulation. It is well known that the capacitated lot sizing and scheduling problem (CLSP) is NP-hard. The problem of this paper that it is an extent of the CLSP is even more complicated; consequently, it necessitates the use of approximated methods to solve this problem. Hence, two new mixed integer programming-based approaches with rolling horizon framework have been used to solve this model. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model and algorithms, some numerical experiments are conducted. The comparative results indicate the superiority of the second heuristic.

Six Sigma is known as the best quality management system, which has been applied in different places with distinct tasks. Any implementation of Six Sigma project normally can succeed only when human resource management is applied within the organization, properly. In this paper, we illustrate the intense of relationships between the human resources management indices and Six Sigma project implementation indices for some selected Iranian manufacturing firms. By using the fuzzy cognitive maps (FCM), we are able to show the strength of relationships among various indices. This study helps quality and human resource managers learn how to manage the critical indices to achieve their determined goals and to increase Six Sigma project performance throw human resource management perspective.

Nowadays Business Intelligence (BI) tools provide several decision support environment in enterprise systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and they are mainly associated with computer-based techniques used in identifying, extracting and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments, or by associated costs and incomes. The purpose of this paper is to provide a unified framework for the application of BI in ERP systems, which results in value-added quality control and management systems. In this paper, we expect to create business process automation and interaction between environment and technology by applying BI in ERP. Finally, a model is developed to represent the relationship between BI (as enabler of ERP) and the implementation of total quality management (TQM). The results indicate that using business intelligence, as an enabler of ERP, had good effect on achieving successful implementation of all three steps of Mukherjee model.

Nowadays, environmental issues are considered as the most important factor for competition. In this era, just modern companies can compete with each other and any environment friendly firm plays essential role in gaining more market share. Besides, the 21st century is the era of modern steel and Iranian iron steel industry plays important role in the domestic and international trade only through emphasizing on protection of environment. Therefore, designing a model for strengthening the environmental performance in steel industries is necessary to get some advantages such as energy saving, reducing pollutants, eliminating (declining) of waste, creating value for customers and improving the productivity. In this research, first, we explain green supply chain management and then grey-based DEMATEL Technique is used to identify different factors influencing the green supply chain. Eventually, the green supply chain model (GSCM) is applied for the steel industry. The result determines the most prominence factors of GSCM in Yazd Steel Industry.

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.