A hybrid model for ranking critical successful factors of Lean Six Sigma in the oil and gas industry
The Tqm Journal, Mar 17, 2021
PurposeThe aim of this paper is to find and prioritise multiple critical success factors (CSFs) f... more PurposeThe aim of this paper is to find and prioritise multiple critical success factors (CSFs) for the implementation of LSS in the oil and gas industry.Design/methodology/approachBased on a preselected list of possible CFSs, experts are involved in screening them with the Delphi method. As a result, 22 customised CSFs are selected. To prioritise these CSFs, the step-wise weight assessment ratio analysis (SWARA) method is applied to find weights corresponding to the decision-making preferences. Since the regular permutation-based weight assessment can be classified as NP-hard, the problem is solved by a metaheuristic method. For this purpose, a genetic algorithm (GA) is used.FindingsThe resulting prioritisation of CSFs helps companies find out which factors have a high priority in order to focus on them. The less important factors can be neglected and thus do not require limited resources.Research limitations/implicationsOnly a specific set of methods have been considered.Practical implicationsThe resulting prioritisation of CSFs helps companies find out which factors have a high priority in order to focus on them.Social implicationsThe methodology supports respective evaluations in general.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the very limited research on the implementation of LSS in the oil and gas industry, and, in addition, it suggests the usage of SWARA, a permutation method and a GA, which have not yet been researched, for the prioritisation of CSFs of LSS.
Ranking performance indicators related to banking by using hybrid multicriteria methods in an uncertain environment: a case study for Iran under COVID-19 conditions
Systems Science & Control Engineering, Mar 21, 2022
On the Development and Future Aspects of Vector Optimization and MCDM
Springer eBooks, 1997
ABSTRACT The paper is divided into three parts: (1) Historical sketch, (2) Main streams of resear... more ABSTRACT The paper is divided into three parts: (1) Historical sketch, (2) Main streams of research, (3) Future development. In the first part, a concise review of the historical roots and the developments of vector optimization in the sense of decision making under several goals (objective functions) is presented. In the second part, various main streams are discussed. Two basic aspects of vector optimization can be distinguished: the pure theoretical, mainly mathematical one, and the more practical, methodologically oriented one. A brief survey of vector optimization theory is given. In the third part, we try to outline directions of future development based on the knowledge of past and present trends.
Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Sep 15, 2020
Purpose -This paper aims to assess and prioritize manufacturing companies in the healthcare indus... more Purpose -This paper aims to assess and prioritize manufacturing companies in the healthcare industry based on critical success factors (CSFs) of their reverse logistics (RL). The research involves seven medical device companies located in the Tehran Province, Iran. Design/methodology/approach -To identify and prioritize companies based on CSFs of RL, the study proposes a three-phase decision-making framework that integrates the Delphi method, the best-worst method (BWM) and the Additive Ratio Assessment (ARAS) method with Z-numbers. The weights required for this method are obtained by a variant of the BWM based on Z-numbers, denoted as Z-numbers Best-Worst Method, or ZBWM. Since decision-makers face an uncertain environment, Z-numbers, which are a kind of fuzzy numbers, are applied. Findings -First, after customizing CSFs by the Delphi method and obtaining 15 CSFs of RL, these are ranked by the hybrid BWM-ARAS method with Z-numbers. Results reveal which company appears to perform best with respect to their RL implementations. Based on this result, healthcare device companies should choose the highest priority company based on the selected RL CSFs and results from using the BWM-ARAS method with Z-numbers. Originality/value -The contribution of this paper is using a hybrid ARAS-BWM method based on Z-numbers. Each of these methods has some merits compared to other similar methods. The combination of these methods contributes a new approach for prioritizing companies based on RL CSFs with high accuracy and reliability.
We collaborate with a gig work platform company (GPC) in Switzerland. The project aims to improve... more We collaborate with a gig work platform company (GPC) in Switzerland. The project aims to improve the business by influencing process management within the GPC, providing automated matching of jobs to workers, improving worker acquisition and worker commitment, and particularly focusing on the prevention of no shows. One expects to achieve financial, organizational and efficiency gains. As research tools we use a combination of text mining and sentiment analysis, Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN), interviews with workers and employers, and the design of sociotechnical improvements to the process, including platform improvements and prototypes. Here, we focus on the successful combination of BPMN modelling with sentiment analysis in the identification of problems and generation of ideas for future modifications to the business processes.
Challenges in MOOC education for both practical and theoretical courses are identified by the res... more Challenges in MOOC education for both practical and theoretical courses are identified by the researchers, both experimentally and through a case study. The insights brought by empirical studies helped researchers to propose a framework to make higher education in engineering and management truly online and tuition free. The objective of this chapter is to propose a flexible online degree framework through SWAYAM or any other online platform being approved by education regulator. The process involving course enrollment, learning, evaluation, and outcome is contained in the proposed flexible system that leads to tuition free online degrees. The proposed system not only gives students a freedom to choose their courses in accordance with their flexibility but also use earned credit towards online degrees of any university of their choice.
Requirements Engineering in Agile Software Startups - Insights from Multiple Case Studies
Springer eBooks, 2021
This exploratory case study was conducted with five IT startups in order to investigate how requi... more This exploratory case study was conducted with five IT startups in order to investigate how requirement engineering-related activities are performed and what is the state of maturity with the practices & tools used. Another objective was to study that how the startups managed their practices during Corona Virus (COVID19) pandemic time. The results indicate that flexibility and access to the online tools were the main strengths of the startups to cope up with the pandemic situation while fluctuating market demands affected them marginally. The startups do vary in domain, team size, practices and selection of the tools, with matured startups having more structured (but flexible) processes compared to younger startups. The young startups have the opportunity to learn from the practices of the matured startups, to adopt the learning in their working context. The previous software development experience of the startups and its founders does affect the maturity of the practices and selection of the tools. The flexibility and agility as evident in the working context of the startups helped them to turn pandemic situation into their business opportunities.
Studies in systems, decision and control, Jul 8, 2020
This chapter reflects on the business innovation supported by developing text mining solutions to... more This chapter reflects on the business innovation supported by developing text mining solutions to meet the business needs communicated by Swiss companies. Two related projects from different industries and with different challenges are discussed in order to identify common procedures and methodologies that can be used. One of the partners, in the gig work sector, offers a platform solution for employee recruitment for temporary work. The work assessment is performed using short reviews for which a method for sentiment assessment based on machine learning has been developed. The other partner, in the financial advice sector, operates an information extraction service for business documents, including insurance policies. This requires automation in the extraction of structured information from pdf-files. The common path to innovation in such projects includes business process modeling and the implementation of novel technological solutions, including text mining techniques.
In the current highly competitive airline market, many companies have failed due to their low rev... more In the current highly competitive airline market, many companies have failed due to their low revenue rates. For this reason, many of them have to develop strategies to increase their revenue. In this study, we develop revenue management (RM) strategy for the Iranian airline industry. More specifically, we present a mathematical model that considers some conditions not studied in previous research in order to provide a more realistic RM modeling of airlines that fits well for the special characteristics of Iranian Airways. A binary differential evolution algorithm is employed to solve the model due to the stochastic nature of data and the NP-hardness of the considered problem. To generate maximum revenue among the six types of airplanes that fly the four capital cities of Iran, the airline under investigation is advised to operate only 21 flights to those cities and cancel the rest of the flights.
Journal of Business Economics and Management, Oct 19, 2020
The aim of the study in this paper is to show how the performance of banks can be evaluated by ra... more The aim of the study in this paper is to show how the performance of banks can be evaluated by ranking them based on Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and Multicriteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods. Nowadays, assessing the performance of companies is a vital work for finding their weaknesses and strengths. The banking sector is an important area in the service sector. Many people want to know which bank performs best when entrusting their money to them. For assessing the performance of banks, BSC can be used. This method helps to translate strategic issues to meaningful insights for the respective financial institutions. After that, the banks will be ranked based on performance indicators by the Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment (WASPAS) method. Because this method is based on a decision matrix, weights are required. To find such weights, the Step-wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA) method is applied. The results show that the International Bank of Colombia has a much better performance than other Colombian banks. Besides, further insights regarding the evaluation process based on BSC, SWARA, and WASPAS are obtained.
Supplier selection in the oil & gas industry: A comprehensive approach for Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis
Socio-economic Planning Sciences, Feb 1, 2022
Abstract The focus of this paper is on selecting suppliers in the Oil and Gas (O&G) industry ... more Abstract The focus of this paper is on selecting suppliers in the Oil and Gas (O&G) industry by developing a comprehensive approach for Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) based on alternative methods capable of assessing different aspects of supplier selection uncertainty in terms of utility functions and criteria related to efficiency. The O&G industry has a key role in the public sector of various countries such as Iran with its revenues being of prime importance to develop infrastructure facilities such as for healthcare, education, and transportation. This comprehensive approach walks through various stages for selecting Critical Success Factors (CSFs), ranking suppliers, and for setting partial weighting alternatives. While CSFs are selected using a traditional Delphi approach, the partial supplier rankings are defined based on Complex Proportional Assessment (COPRAS) utility functions together with criteria weights derived from Step-wise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA) for each CSF. As it concerns information reliability of utility and efficiency functions of both methods obtained via expert preferences or perceptions, Z-numbers are used to address the intrinsic fuzziness level inherent to each analytical stage. Iran's economy depends on revenues from oil and other related production, which means that by earning more income from this industry, most of its economic indicators such as GDP and employment rate should increase significantly, thus leading to economic growth. Various countries put plans in place related to production for increasing their social economics. One of these plans is focused on suppliers since they have a high impact on providing essential items such as equipment, HR, and transportation, so by choosing the best suppliers in all fields, costs will decrease and consequently revenue will increase. This research points out how to rank O&G industry suppliers using MCDA methods in an uncertain environment. An example based on actual data from an Iranian O&G company is provided to show the applicability of the approach proposed. Results suggest that the complexity of O&G operations on selecting suppliers can be adequately handled by information reliability techniques applied to traditional economic concepts such as utility- and efficiency-related factors, particularly in business environments characterized by a trade embargo.
European Journal of Operational Research, Dec 1, 1999
In this article we consider the problem of nonessential objectives for multiobjective optimizatio... more In this article we consider the problem of nonessential objectives for multiobjective optimization problems (MOP) with linear objective functions. In 1977 an approach based on the reduction of size of the matrix of objective functions has been worked out by one of the present authors (Gal, T., European Journal of Operations Research 1, 176±184). Although this method for dropping nonessential objectives leads to a mathematically equivalent MOP, problems concerning the application of MOP methods may arise. For instance, dropping some (or all) of the nonessential objectives the question is, how to ensure obtaining the same solution as with all objectives involved. We consider the problem of adapting the parameters of multiobjective optimization methods. For the case of weighting methods a simple procedure for adapting the weights is analyzed. For other methods, e.g. reference point approaches, such a simple possibility for adapting the parameters is not given.
Multicriteria Decision Making: Advances in MCDM Models, Algorithms, Theory, and Applications
Distributors for North, Central and South America: Kluwer Academic Publishers 101 Philip Drive As... more Distributors for North, Central and South America: Kluwer Academic Publishers 101 Philip Drive Assinippi Park Norwell, Massachusetts 02061 USA Telephone (781) 871-6600 Fax (781) 871-6528 E-Mail< kluwer@ wkap. com> Distributors for all other countries: Kluwer ...
The tremendous increase in documents available on the Web has turned finding the relevant pieces ... more The tremendous increase in documents available on the Web has turned finding the relevant pieces of information into a challenging, tedious, and time-consuming activity. Text summarization is an important natural language processing (NLP) task used to reduce the reading requirements of text. Automatic text summarization is an NLP task that consists of creating a shorter version of a text document which is coherent and maintains the most relevant information of the original text. In recent years, automatic text summarization has received significant attention, as it can be applied to a wide range of applications such as the extraction of highlights from scientific papers or the generation of summaries of news articles. In this research project, we are focused mainly on abstractive text summarization that extracts the most important contents from a text in a rephrased form. The main purpose of this project is to summarize texts in German. Unfortunately, most pretrained models are only available for English. We therefore focused on the German BERT multilingual model and the BART monolingual model for English, with a consideration of translation possibilities. As the source of the experiment setup, took the German Wikipedia article dataset and compared how well the multilingual model performed for German text summarization when compared to using machinetranslated text summaries from monolingual English language models. We used the ROUGE-1 metric to analyze the quality of the text summarization.
Wettbewerbsvorteile in der Kundenbeziehung durch Business Software Praxislösungen im Detail Falls... more Wettbewerbsvorteile in der Kundenbeziehung durch Business Software Praxislösungen im Detail Fallstudien Konzepte Modellierung Das Kompetenzwerk der Schweizer Fachhochschulen für E-Business und E-Government Die in diesem Buch enthaltenen Fallstudien wurden im Rahmen der Initiative eXperience im Jahr 2008 erstellt und an zwei Veranstaltungen, dem eXperience Event in Basel (www.experience-event.ch) und dem Koblenzer Forum für Business Software (www.kofobis.de) präsentiert. Sie wurden wissenschaftlich aufbereitet durch Business-Software-Experten der Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz FHNW, der Universität Koblenz-Landau, der Universität Bern, der Berner Fachhochschule, der Fachhochschule St. Gallen, der Universität zu Köln, der Universität der Bundeswehr München sowie von Experten aus der Praxis. Die Ecademy (www.ecademy.ch), das Schweizer Kompetenznetzwerk für E-Business und E-Government, unterstützt die eXperience-Initiative (www.experience-online.ch) ideell und finanziell. www.hanser.de Bibliografische Information Der Deutschen Bibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über abrufbar. Dieses Werk ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Alle Rechte, auch die der Übersetzung, des Nachdruckes und der Vervielfältigung des Buches, oder Teilen daraus, vorbehalten. Kein Teil des Werkes darf ohne schriftliche Genehmigung des Verlages in irgendeiner Form (Fotokopie, Mikrofilm oder ein anderes Verfahren) -auch nicht für Zwecke der Unterrichtsgestaltungreproduziert oder unter Verwendung elektronischer Systeme verarbeitet, vervielfältigt oder verbreitet werden.
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