Identifying and ranking suppliers' resilience evaluation criteria in the natural stone industry

In today's markets that industries have faced different risks and disruptions, selecting the appropriate and resilient supplier has become a strategic factor for the success and sustainability of organizations in a turbulent and competitive business environment and has attracted much attention from researchers and practitioners. The natural stone industry is one of the most important industries in Iran. Hence, this study aims to identify and rank the evaluation criteria of resiliency in a real case study of natural stone industry. Gathering the criteria was done based on the previous related literature and in order to confirm the identified criteria, a survey of 10 stone industry experts was conducted using the fuzzy Delphi method. Consequently, 20 criteria was approved. In order to rank the approved criteria, the best-worst method (BWM) was used. The results showed that flexibility, velocity and financial performance are the most important suppliers' resiliency evaluation criteria in the stone industry, respectively

Determination of Criticality Indexes in the Remanufacturing Process: A GERT-based Simulation Approach

In this paper one of the important “end of life options” (remanufacturing) has been analysed. Among the related studies surveyed the various remanufacturing aspects, less attention has been paid to the stochastic process routing. In this regard, a remanufacturing process routing with stochastic activities is modelled as a GERT network. One of the efficient ways to analyse a remanufacturing process is the identification of most effective activities based on the cost and time of the process during the process implementation. Criticality indexes are suitable scales for this purpose. Therefore, to analyse the important aspects of the remanufacturing process, four criticality indexes are developed in this paper. These indexes measure the cost and time of the process and its activities to identify the activities with high importance in terms of cost and time. On the other hand, simulation is an efficient tool to cope with the uncertainties in the production problems. Hence a Monte Carlo approach (which is developed using Arena software) has been adopted to analyse the GERT based model and to calculate the criticality indexes. In addition, a mathematical approach using Moment Generation Functions has been adopted to calculate the expected value of the criticality indexes. In addition, a numerical example (lathe spindle remanufacturing) has been solved using both proposed approaches. Results show the acceptable performance of the proposed GERT based simulation approach

Dimensions of Alignment between Digital Capability and Innovation Strategy in Petrochemical Industry

The reduction of profit margins and the disappearance of past competitive advantages have pushed companies in Petrochemical industries toward innovation by utilizing digital capabilities. This necessitates the establishment of a strategic alignment between digital capabilities and innovation strategies and decisions. This research aims to examine the dimensions of alignment between digital capability variables and innovation strategies and create a framework for its assessment. Initially, by reviewing the background of studies, a framework for assessing each of the variables was developed. Subsequently, a questionnaire for confirmatory structural analysis of the identified concepts and dimensions was formulated. This questionnaire was completed by 99 experts in innovation management, digital technologies in the industry, and academia. As a result, it was determined that to assess the level of alignment between digital capabilities and innovation strategies, creating digital value and digital innovation processes for innovation strategies, digital innovation infrastructure and digital innovation capabilities for digital capabilities, and complementarity, balance, and coordination for alignment were considered as assessment dimensions of the variables

A system dynamics model of the impact of COVID-19 pandemic and foreign direct investment in the global supply chain

Abstract COVID-19 pandemic is a great challenge that the world has been faced in recent decades. The pandemic has affected the global trade and has caused a dramatic fall in Foreign Direct Investments (FDI). The impact on FDI is concentrated in the countries that are severely hit by the pandemic, although negative impact of disruptions is observed in other countries. In this paper, a system dynamics model is developed to simulate the impact of the pandemic on the FDI. Results showed that the level of force majeure condition and also the level of flexibility are two important factors that impact on the FDI and other important variables of the supply chain. In the case of lower severity of pandemic and higher flexibility, FDI is higher than the case that these parameters are in their worst condition

A service-oriented architecture for generating and sharing science and knowledge in the e-science environment

The excellence of a society relies on the importance of science in the community. In this century, by the emergence of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), the generation and sharing of science has been very fast. The e-science terminology has been developed to introduce such revolutions. Also the progress of the society depends directly on the efficient generation and sharing of the science. Therefore, in this study, for the first time in the scientific community of Iran, the e-science issue was investigated. Thus, in this paper based on the novelty of the issue, after the introduction of e- science, a service-oriented architecture is presented in this environment. The components of the proposed architecture are based on three significant facts: data, computations and communications each of these components, individually have different elements. These components were extracted according to features of the architectures of related researches. These components together, facilitate generation and sharing of the science and knowledge. Finally, to illustrate the proposed architecture and relations between components, a case study is surveyed