Stock Audit in Retail Outlets: A Case Study

Stocks and physical assets, such as raw materials, products, plant and machinery, office equipment, IT systems, and so on, are value assets of a company. With companies today operating across multiple locations with various channel partners, ensuring all assets exist as per the books of record is a challenge for the operations and facilities functions. Stock audits help retail outlets in controlling several cost components. They help to check the level of opening stock and closing stock from previous periods, and thus help the company to account for short supply, damages, expired items, quality and quantity. Stock audits also check the billing process and ensure proper cash management. Thus, stock audits are required to be conducted in stores at least once in a month in order to avoid any frauds and to have proper control over stock. This study is a case study of a stock audit in the retail outlets of a leading player in the specialty bakery and confectionary sector in India. The study focuses on benchmarking the Damages/Returns and Variance in six selected outlets, in order to establish a system of proper control

A STUDY ON ACCEPTABILITY OF E-LEARNING IN INDIAN EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

Though e-learning is broadly accepted across the education spectrum as an effective teaching-learning medium, its acceptance is found very wanting. This paper looks at the basic process of innovation that can induce teaching faculty in India to take up e-learning and to understand how innovative teaching-learning processes like e-learning can be applied to education. It goes on further to identify and understand some of the broadly accepted reasons for the low acceptability and usage with the help of an online survey. The survey was used to study what motivates the student and teacher to take e-learning as an effective pedagogy and to answer some of the pertinent problems relating to its low acceptability. The analysis of the survey results is given. A new “stakeholder involvement and feedback based” theoretical model is proposed explaining how to implement e-learning effectively in educational institutions in India. Some possible suggestions like effective problem-solving tools like Total Quality Management (TQM) to help overcome the drawbacks in the system are also proposed

A Study of Foreign Exchange Exposure in the Indian IT Sector

Foreign exchange exposure measures the extent of fluctuation of a firm’s future cash flows with respect to exchange rate movements. In particular, such fluctuation can have an adverse impact on firms which are already under tight liquidity constraints, often leading to financial distress. Thus, firms must evaluate their foreign exchange exposure in order to effectively hedge their foreign exchange risk. This study examines the issue of foreign exchange rate exposure in the Indian information technology (IT) sector. Foreign exchange exposure is particularly important for firms in the Indian IT sector, as a major part of their revenue is derived from exports. Dash and Madhava (2009) found positive foreign exchange exposure for the sector in the period 2005-07, and alarmingly high level of exposure for some small-cap IT companies.  Since then, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the nature of the IT sector has dramatically changed, with lower dependence on the US market in particular. The present study assesses whether there is still significant positive foreign exchange exposure in the Indian IT sector, and whether there is still a significant difference in foreign exchange exposur

Variable Sign-Sign Wilcoxon Algorithm: A Novel Approach for System Identification

Behavioral study of a system is an important task. It is mostly used in real world environments and became an emergent research area. Various approaches have been proposed since last two decades. In this paper, we have proposed a Variable Step-Size Sign-Sign Wilcoxon Approach, that is robust against outliers in the desired data and also convergence speed is faster than Wilcoxon norm based approach. In initial stage, Sign-Sign Wilcoxon norm based approach has been verified. Next to it, the proposed approach is verified and compared for the application in Linear and Non-linear system identification problems in presence of outliers.DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijece.v2i4.83

EXPLORING STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF MATHEMATICS

This study examines the determinants of perception of mathematics among postgraduate management students, including the influence of fathers, mothers, peers, and teachers. The study was conducted with postgraduate management students in Bangalore, India. The respondents were in the age group 21-28 years, with varied demographic and educational backgrounds. The results of the study suggest that the influence of peers had the strongest impact on the perception of mathematics. Thus, the perception of mathematics can be maximally enhanced amongst students by leveraging peer group learning. The peer groups and group assignments must be carefully designed so that the students are encouraged to support one another according to their abilities, and to contribute to overall group learning.   The finding that the influence of peer groups has the strongest impact on the perception of mathematics is an original contribution to the literature, as earlier studies had not focused on the impact of peer group influence on students’ perception of mathematics. However, the composition of the peer group, and its impact on the perception of mathematics needs to be examined more carefully. In fact, the interaction between the different influence factors is another important aspect that needs to be studied in more detail, including the influence factors studied in the literature. An experimental design would probably be more appropriate for this; however, there may be difficulties in identifying/assessing the long-run impact of these factors. Thus, there is vast scope for further, more detailed study in this area

Pedagogical issues in hypothesis testing

Hypothesis testing is a statistical technique which is used to evaluate assumptions about a population on the basis of sample data, to determine the extent to which they are tenable. Hypothesis testing is the most widely-applied statistical technique, particularly because of the emphasis on hypothesis development and testing in the scientific method. Unfortunately, students and researchers are quite prone to making mistakes and misinterpreting inferences in hypothesis testing. These mistakes and misinterpretations tend to arise from insufficient understanding of the probability and sampling theory underlying the logic of hypothesis testing. The present study attempts to identify the causes of different types of mistakes made in hypothesis testing, in order to suggest pedagogical strategies to avoid these mistakes. The data for the study was collected from a sample of postgraduate management students in Bangalore, India, using specially-designed business decision-making case lets based on hypothesis testing. The analysis focuses on the incidence of different types of mistakes that the respondents committed, particularly with respect to the type of tests, and uses multiple linear discriminant analysis to identify the factors impacting the overall inference, i.e. the correct taking of the decision and the correct drawing of the conclusion. The key finding of the study is that both the formulation and computation factors play a significant role in taking the overall inference. Further, in each panel, the critical discriminator was found to be the aspect for which the incidence of mistakes was highest. With increasing complexity of the hypothesis test, the computation factor was found to become more important. In panels A and B (tests for a single population mean and proportion, respectively), formulation aspects were found to be the most significant discriminators, and in panel C (test for equality of means), both formulation and computation aspects were significant; on the other hand, for the remaining panels (test for independence, one-way ANOVA, and two-way ANOVA), only computation aspects were significant. The study contributes to the literature by proposing some pedagogical strategies for teaching of different types of hypothesis tests based on the findings

Banking Performance Measurement for Indian Banks Using AHP and TOPSIS

Multi-criteria decision modelling (MCDM) offers a range of procedures for evaluation problems requiring the ranking of a discrete set of alternatives, including the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). These procedures have been widely applied for banking performance evaluation (Önder & Hepşen, 2013).The present study compared the outcomes of AHP and TOPSIS for evaluation of a sample of 35 Indian banks, including 19 public sector banks and 16 private sector banks. The variables used in the analysis pertained to the financial ratios corresponding to the CAMEL parameters. The weights for different parameters in the CAMEL model were obtained by factor analysis. The results of the study indicated an overall consistency between the rankings, resulting from the models. A significant difference was found in the performance between private sector banks and public sector banks. In particular, banks that were found to be consistently ranked high by both models can be taken as the best performers, and banks that were found to be consistently ranked low by both models can be taken as the worst performers. This would enable regulators and policy makers, on the one hand, to benchmark the performance of banks against that of best performers, and on the other hand, to take steps to improve the performance of worst performers. The results of the study also needed to be examined more carefully to identify the critical performance parameters for banks

A study of regional trends in external debt in developing economies

This study examines the trends in external debt in developing countries across different regions. The variables considered were gross external debt, public and public guaranteed external debt, short-term external debt, and variable rate external debt. The data were collected from the joint BIS-IMF-OECD-World Bank statistics on external debt, pertaining to the period 1995-2014. The results of the study highlight significant regional imbalances in external debt, which may contribute to the risk of sovereign-debt default. East Asia & Pacific region had high level of gross external debt and high percentage of short-term external debt. Europe & Central Asia region had high level of gross external debt, high gross external debt growth rate, high percentage of variable rate external debt, high ratio of short-term external debt relative to GDP, and high ratio of variable rate external debt relative to GDP; perhaps reflecting the ongoing European Sovereign Debt Crisis. Latin America & Caribbean region had high level of gross external debt and high percentage of variable rate external debt. Middle East & North Africa region had high percentage of public and public guaranteed external debt. South Asia had high gross external debt growth rate, high public and public guaranteed external debt growth rate, high short-term external debt growth rate, and high variable rate external debt growth rate in the post-crisis period. Sub-Saharan Africa region had high percentage of public and public guaranteed external debt and high variable rate external debt growth rate in the post-crisis period. Thus, each of the regions had specific types of risk. The individual developing economies in the regions need to be examined carefully to isolate their contribution to regional sovereign-debt default ris

TESTING THE STATIONARITY OF BETA FOR AUTOMOTIVE AND AUTO-ANCILLARY SECTOR STOCKS IN INDIAN STOCK MARKET

Introduction The Capital Asset Pricing Model is the original model of capital market equilibrium, expressing the expected return of any asset as a function of three quantities only: the asset's beta (the rate of change of asset return with respect to market return), the risk-free rate, and the expected market return. Mathematically