Management Research in Iran

Abstract Decision-making in competitive situations is a challenge for managers. Identifying the strategic success factors (SSF) for each company and  determining the company’s position relative to its competitors due to the SSF are critical, which top managers use for survival in the competitive conditions. The aim of this paper is to create a quantitative method to determine the competitive benchmarking. In this study, average cost of production, company's brand equity, product quality, marketing and sales capabilities, purchasing capabilities, customer satisfaction, production flexibility, engineering capabilities, technical research capabilities, and the number of  R & D projects were identified as critical success factors by the experts of Profile and Pipe Steel Industry. The technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution was used to determine the positive benchmark (as positive ideal solution) and negative benchmark (as negative ideal solution). Then by considering the budget constraint, binary goal programming model was used to maximize the positive deviation between each rival and the negative benchmark, and to minimize the negative deviation between each rival and the positive benchmark. The results of the proposed model showed that which SSF rival should be considered to reach the positive benchmark.   Keywords:  

Abstract This paper proposes a Fuzzy Multiple Criteria Decision Making (FMCDM) approach for measuring supply chains capability with the main aim of customer satisfaction development. Drawing on the four measurement criterions of a Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model, this research first summarized the customer satisfaction and performance indexes synthesized from the literature relating to supply chains capability. Then, for screening, the indexes fit for supply chains capability in customer satisfaction development were selected through fuzzy screening. Furthermore, the relative weights of the chosen indexes were calculated by Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP). The MCDM analytical tool of TOPSIS was adopted to rank the supply chains performance and improve the gaps with three supply chains as an empirical example. The analysis results highlighted the critical aspects of evaluation criteria as well as the gaps to improve supply chains capability for achieving the aspired/desired level of customer satisfaction development. The results also showed that the proposed FMCDM measuring model using the SCOR framework can be a useful and effective assessment tool.