Quality management in logistics sector: Principles and practice: Sule Selcuk

As it is the case for production and service sectors, one of the key ways for a logistics company to create sustainable competitive advantage is to differentiate itself from the rest with the quality that it offers. Researchers and practitioners have developed various quality improvement policies for logistics service providers and each of the policies addresses certain aspects of the business. This study individually evaluates the major quality approaches involved in an attempt to explore prospects of combining them in a way to maximize the benefit of their implementation. To promote applicability the quality approaches are analyzed from the perspective of customers as well as that of implementers of quality programmes

A survey of aircraft materials: Design for airworthiness and sustainability: Kemal Yıllıkçı, Fehim Findik

New developments in material science and its technologies find their best implementation areas in aircraft and space vehicles. Since the beginning of the powered flight, weight of airframes and systems are needed to be reduced.  They are developed and built by light, durable and affordable materials through highly disciplined design, development, test and certification as well as manufacturing processes.  Besides airframes, engineers are challenged to develop more efficient engines; both by reducing their weights and improving their aero-thermodynamic properties, sustaining higher operational and safety reliabilities along with complying stringent emission and noise restrictions. These conditions are increasing the demand for  the development  and the utilization of  advanced lighter, stronger and durable materials and alloys, ceramic coatings and relevant manufacturing processes.   In this study, current trends and future expectations from material technologies in general; for accomplishing higher expectations for future lighter airframes, aircraft systems and engines, are reviewed.&nbsp

Mechanical properties and corrosion behaviors in 3.5% NaCl solution of grade-A and dual-phase steels welded by FCAW: Hüseyin Uzun, Emrah Önal

The first aim of this study is to demonstrate the transformation of Grade-A steel into dual-phase steel by heat-treatment at the chosen 730°C and 800°C intercritical temperature for 60 min followed by cold water quenching. The second aim of this study is to investigate the mechanical properties and the corrosion behaviours in 3.5% NaCl solution of Grade-A and dual-phase steels welded by flux-cored arc welding (FCAW). It was carried out the mass loss measurements and investigated the micro and macrostructures of welding zone using by optical microscope. The present study has demonstrated that Grade-A ship steel consisting of ferrite and pearlite can be successfully transformed to the dual-phase steel at the chosen intercritical temperatures. The microstructure of transformed dual-phase steel consists of island of martensite in a ferrite matrix. The Grade-A and transformed dual-phase steels were successfully joined by FCAW. The mechanical results showed that the tensile strength of the transformed dual-phase steel were higher, but lower elongation than that of the Grade-A steel. The results from the immersion test in 3.5% NaCl solution showed that the corrosion behaviours of the dual-phase and Grade-A steels depend upon the morphology of the phase constituents. The corrosion rate of the transformed dual-phase steel with ferrite-martensite structure was lower than that of the Grade-A steel with ferrit- pearlite structure. The corrosion has preferential started at fusion line and progressed towards the heat affected zone (HAZ) of the welded dual-phase and Grade-A steels

Analyzing classified listings at an E-commerce site by using survival analysis: Ayhan Demiriz, Furkan Gökçegöz, Sümeyye Şen

Sahibinden.com is a leading e-commerce site in Turkey where sellers (buyers) may advertise their goods (needs) with or without a fee.  Since it generates a large volume of traffic to the classified car listings, the site plays an important role for determining the market value of the used cars. In this study, we first randomly selected 200 car classifieds from 950 new classified ads on the day of February 22, 2012. We then observed these listings on a daily basis for a month to determine the possible updates and deletions of the ads. We assume that if an ad is taken out it means that the car has been sold. In addition to the cars’ features, we observed the posted price and the number of daily views of the ads throughout the data collection. Therefore one can construct survival models to study the effects of the features and price of a car on the life of the ad. In other words, it is possible to study that what features and price levels expedite the sales of used cars

Production of functionally graded AlB2/Al-4%Mg composite by centrifugal casting: Ömer Savaş, Ramazan Kayikci, Ferit Ficici, Sakip Köksal

In this study, production of functionally graded AlB2 reinforced Al-4%Mg composite has been investigated. In-situ high-aspect-ratio flake AlB2 reinforcement was obtained by the addition of boron oxide to the liquid Al-Mg at 1400 °C. It has been observed that there were two distinct regions without a smooth grading: one is rich of and the other is poor of AlB2. The results showed that the highest AlB2 content has been found to be around 10% in external zones, whereas the lowest AlB2 content has been observed to be 0.02% in the internal zones.  Additionally,   results showed that, depending on the increase in the reinforcement phase in external zones, up to 20 % increase in the hardness of the composite has been achieved

A conceptual framework of a cloud-based customer analytics tool for retail SMEs

Since customers are seen as a strategic element in a company’s downstream supply chain, many retail organizations have been employing a customer-centric business strategy and started investing into such technologies and solutions known as customer analytics that are capable of processing huge amount customer data for enhanced decision making. Customer analytics has been of significant importance in most developed economies around the world particularly for large organizations. The off-the-shelf analytics solutions provided by vendors are perceived to be unmanageable, risky and unaffordable especially for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) operating in retail sector. This becomes more vital for the SMEs in developing countries especially in the Eastern part of Europe where they constitute a noteworthy part of the economy. The majority of the SMEs in these countries lack of facilities, infrastructure and abilities to perform such analytical applications. Not being able to extract strategic knowledge using customer data is a missing component for them to be competitive and sustainable in the market from relationship marketing point of view. The aim of this paper is to propose a conceptual model that addresses this problem by providing retail SMEs with a cloud-based open platform for customer data analytics and knowledge extraction. The platform will be able to connect with numerous apps already employed at the retail SMEs, acquire customer data and then perform customer analytics in order to produce a rich set of reports and knowledge