Navigating SWOT-FANP with GSM method to prioritize the strategic location

[[abstract]]This paper proposes a SWOT-FANP (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats – fuzzy analytic network process) analysis, together with the grand strategy matrix method (GSM) to deal with the multiple-criteria decision-making problem of location selection for a second tier city in China. This hybrid method can not only combine both qualitative and quantitative information and utilize fuzzy logic to eliminate vagueness, subjectivity, and imprecision, it can also clearly represents the competitive position of second-tier cities on a the quadrant coordinate to help an enterprise choose a strategy for development. To this end, I empirically chose a multinational pharmaceutical enterprise (MNE) as an illustrative example. The results reveal that Suzhou and Chongqing cities are in the best positions in the competition as a result of having external opportunities for development and internal competing strength. Moreover, the MNE could adopt a niche-focus strategy for the market by focusing on specific ailments to which people in Chinese communities are vulnerable to strengthen their competitive strengths. This study demonstrates and validates that such an enhanced methodology is viable and highly capable of providing enriched insights regarding strategic decision-making management in complex real-world situations.[[journaltype]]國外[[incitationindex]]SSCI[[ispeerreviewed]]Y[[booktype]]紙本[[countrycodes]]LT

An integrated approach to enhance sustainability in industrialised building systems

Building prefabrication is known as Industrialised Building Systems (IBS) in Malaysia. This construction method possesses unique characteristics that are central to sustainable construction. For example, offsite construction enables efficient management of construction wastage by identifying major causes of waste arising during both the design and construction stages. These causes may then be eliminated by the improvement process in IBS component's manufacturing. However, current decisions on using IBS are typically financial driven and hinder the wider ranged adoption. In addition, current IBS misconceptions and the failure of rating schemes in evaluating the sustainability of IBS affect its implementation. A new approach is required to provide better understanding on the sustainability potential of IBS among stakeholders. Such approach should also help project the outcomes of each levels of decision-making to respond to social, economy and environmental challenges. This paper presents interim findings of research aimed at developing a framework for sustainable IBS development and suggests a more holistic approach to achieve sustainability. A framework of embedding sustainability factors is considered in three main phases of IBS construction; 1) Pre-construction, 2) Construction and 3) Post-construction phase. SWOT analysis was used to evaluate the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats involved in the IBS implementations. The action plans are formulated from the analysis of sustainable objectives. This approach will show where and how sustainability should be integrated to improve IBS construction. A mix of quantitative and qualitative methodology was used in this research to explore the potential of IBS in integrating sustainability. The tools used in the study are questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Outcomes from these tools lead to the identification of viable approaches involving 18 critical factors to improve sustainability in IBS constructions. Finally, guidelines for decision-making are being developed to provide a useful source of information and support to mutual benefit of the stakeholders in integrating sustainability issues and concepts into IBS applications

Designing a Mixed Model (ANP-SWOT) to Evaluate Practical Scenarios in the Development of Rural Cooperatives in Iran

Rural cooperatives as a small member-owned organizations are the potential to facilitate socio-economic development in rural areas. This study presents a novel hybrid method to develop strategies for development of rural cooperatives. It combines SWOT analysis, TOWS strategic alternatives matrix, and the analytic network process (ANP). SWOT was used to analyze the external and internal environment of rural cooperatives in Iran using the contributions of a team of experts. This team identified 19 SWOT sub-factors. A TOWS matrix was then constructed and the internal and external environmental sub-factors were combined to create good strategic alternatives. The expert team used the TOWS matrix to identify 11 strategic alternatives. ANP was applied to prioritize the strategic alternatives. According to the experts’ team, the presented combined approach helps managers to choose the best alternative strategies considering both internal and environmental factors

Evaluation of natural gas strategies of Turkey in East Mediterranean region: a strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats and analytic network process approach

Demand for natural gas has severely challenged the world supply among other types of energy sources such as coal, geothermal, nuclear and etc. Natural gas is the most important form of energy because it is clean, abundant, reliable and versatile. Due to the limited and transportable characterizes of natural gas, sharing pipelines for natural gas with other nations can either bring peace and stability or create chaos. To avoid insoluble strategies, it is very explicit to decide scientifically for these kinds of global issues. To do so, a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) – ANP (Analytic Network Process) integrated approach is presented to evaluate natural gas policies for Turkey in terms of East Mediterranean Region. In the first step, the appropriate strategies, SO (strengths-opportunities), ST (strengths-threats), WO (weaknesses-opportunities) and WT (weaknesses-threats) are determined via SWOT analysis including four criteria, 20 sub-criteria and seven strategies. Due to inability of SWOT analysis to prioritize the criteria and rank the strategies, ANP approach which also considers the dependency between criteria is applied in the second step. Finally, the proposed SWOT-ANP approach is compared with other multi criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques to represent the effectiveness and applicability of the model

Implementing Bounded Linear Programming and Analytical Network Process Fuzzy Models to Motivate Employees: a Case Study

In this research, the factors affectinguniversity employees’ motivation and productivity are identified and classified in seven groups; the impact of each motivation factor on the productivity is presented by ANP fuzzy model.Eight universities in Iran were analyzed in this research work. The aim of this study is to explore the productivity of employees. This paper attempts to give new insights intodesigning the portfolio factors, motivating employees for productivity improvement by implementing BLP and ANP fuzzy models.The research results show that there is a positive and significant relationship among reward system, motivation factors, and human resources productivity. In addition, among the options of reward system, the factors of internal (inherent) reward, non-financial external reward, and financial external reward had the highestimpact on increasing motivation and productivity factors. At the next stage, a BLP model is designed according to the importance and impact of each reward system option on motivation and productivity factors and organization limitations, including budget, facilities, and conditions to design portfolio factors motivating employees with the aim of improving productivity. The research results show that actualizing performance evaluation, receiving the feedback from the results of doing tasks by different ways, providing an opportunity for all employees to progress, coordination between job specifications and employees’ abilities, and a manager competency are very critical for improving the organization productivity

A dual perspective towards building resilience in manufacturing organizations

Modern manufacturing organizations exist in the most complex and competitive environment the world has ever known. This environment consists of demanding customers, enabling, but resource intensive Industry 4.0 technology, dynamic regulations, geopolitical perturbations, and innovative, ever-expanding global competition. Successful manufacturing organizations must excel in this environment while facing emergent disruptions generated as biproducts of complex man-made and natural systems. The research presented in this thesis provides a novel two-sided approach to the creation of resilience in the modern manufacturing organization. First, the systems engineering method is demonstrated as the qualitative framework for building literature-derived organizational resilience factors into organizational structures under a life cycle perspective. A quantitative analysis of industry expert survey data through graph theory and matrix approach is presented second to prioritize resilience factors for strategic practical implementation

A product design framework for one-of-a-kind production using integrated quality function deployment and operational research techniques

The process of product design as an early stage of new product development provides systematic approaches that can lead to the success of a company’s competitive strategy in the current turbulent market. By launching an efficient product design procedure can result in the reduction of engineering modifications, cost and production time. One-of-a-Kind Product (OKP) is known as a particular manufacturing system of new product design and development with emphasis on the special order concept. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a comprehensive design framework with cross-functional team members that leads to the development of new or improved products. QFD starts with the House of Quality (HOQ) as an organizing matrix to identify the customers’ requirements (CRs) and translate them into the technical attributes (TAs) of the product and followed by determining the target values for the sets of technical attributes. An evaluation approach to determine the relative importance of CRs and TAs should be considered. In previous researches, the traditional methods such as simple scoring method and application of operational research techniques such as Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) were reported to weigh the requirements and attributes. Despite the obvious inner-relationships among the elements, considering the HOQ as a hierarchical system may be inefficient. In addition, the contradictory effects of a TA on two or more CRs, is the problem that has been neglected. Here, a mathematical model was developed for calculating the TAs target values. A case study (dry gas filter, Namdaran Petro-Gas Industries (NPI™)) is presented to exhibit and verify the procedure of OKP product design. Initially, the framework was developed by integrating QFD-operational research (Analytic Network Process (ANP)) as a systematic method for improvement of dry gas filter design. Interview and study of documents were used to identify the CRs. A robust evaluation on customers’ priority and attributes’ importance with respect to inner-relationships among criteria/sub-criteria was performed. Furthermore, the effects of TAs on CRs with regard to their direction (positive/negative) were considered as the fundamental for developing a Multi-Objective Decision Model (MODM) to be used for determining the TAs target values. For this purpose, the fuzzy conversion scaling technique followed by formulating the partial satisfaction separately was applied. Modified TOPSIS was used to select the basic design among the available designs for further modification. Later, the process continues with the second phase, translating the TAs into the key parts. The available options (retailers) to supply the key parts were identified. As the normal procedure of QFD the relative importance’s of key parts and the options were determined. Finally, a zero-one goal programming was presented to select the optimum options for each key part subject to the budget constraint. Overall, the developed QFD-ANP framework provides a systematic approach that has the potential to be used for designing OKP product

Effective synergic interaction of strategic business units of diversified company

Integration processes in the global economy promote the development of diversified integrated companies, representing a group of legally and economically independent and/or affiliated companies that carry out joint activities based on interaction and interconnections development. It is the study of the interconnections of strategic business units of diversified companies that allows to distinguish synergistic interaction features, which, in the long run, ensures the achievement of sustainable competitive advantages for companies. The main purpose of this study is to distinguish the features of the synergistic interaction of strategic business units of diversified companies and the creation of management tools for them. The authors developed and presented the simulation model for managing the interaction of strategic business units of diversified companies based on synergy and proposed an algorithm for its application in real business practice for a company operating in the building ceramic market

Urban Land Governance: “Action Space”, Legitimacy of and Intervention Strategies for Urban Informal Settlements in Nepal

At the global level, the informal settlements are in a dichotomy of legal and illegal debates. This paper analyzes the issue of informal settlements from the legitimacy perspective. It reveals that, although the settlements are not in legal legitimacy, there is tendency of social legitimacy. The challenges of urban land governance are in how to minimize the gap between legal legitimacy and social legitimacy. Firstly, this paper explores on how the actions of government and non-government organizations contribute towards legitimacy. To achieve this aim, the analytical framework of “action space” is applied. Secondly, it focuses on identifying intervention strategies that narrow the gap between legal legitimacy and social legitimacy. We studied two cases of informal settlements: the rst is to explore the gap and the second is to explain the intervention strategies. The results show, that due to lack of “action space” of government actors towards legal legitimacy, the civil society actors created their own “action space” which ultimately triggered social legitimacy. In addition to civil society, the actions of local authorities are found to contribute towards social legitimacy as well. To narrow the gap, the identi ed intervention strategies are discussed within the scope of land policy, land tenure security and land development

Strategic Choices of China’s New Energy Vehicle Industry: An Analysis Based on ANP and SWOT

This goal of this paper is to provide a framework by which China should accelerate the development and production of new energy vehicles, which should effectively address current energy and environmental pressures, while promoting the sustainable development of the automotive industry, which is an urgent task. In addition, this paper provides guidelines that seek to transform China’s auto industry while developing a new economic growth point to gain an international competitive advantage with strategic initiatives. This study aims to provide an ANP-SWOT (Analytic Network Process and Strength-Weakness-Opportunity-Threat analysis) approach for an interdependency analysis and to prioritize the new energy automobile industry in China. Firstly, a SWOT model is used to analyze the internal and external factors surrounding the development of the new energy automobile industry in China. Secondly, four types of development strategies are proposed by means of the SWOT matrix according to the conclusions of the factor analysis. Finally, the ANP network structure is designed to measure the effects of influential sub-factors, and then to define a strategic plan for China’s new energy automobile industry. The results of this study show that the optimal short-term development strategy for China’s new energy automotive industry is to increase the construction of new energy vehicle-related facilities, while the best long-term development strategy is to use local advantages and resources, through cost control measures which increase competition within the local new energy automotive industry