Supply chain operations are disrupted due to natural disasters or epidemics. In the recent period, the supply chain suffers from obstacles and major challenges that affect its stages directly due to the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic around the world. The impact of this epidemic on supply chain performance is clear in terms of supply, demand, or logistics. This epidemic is characterized by a rapid spread, so countries have taken preventive policies in an attempt to limit its spread. These policies are direct impacts on the performance of the supply chain in all scopes. The extent of its impact varies from one supply chain to another, according to the activities that the supply chain provides. In order to provide a more accurate study of the impact of the measures taken to limit the spread of the epidemic, this research presents a proposed framework that evaluates the impact of these policies on the three main aspects of the supply chain (supply, demand, and logistics). The proposed framework is build using BWM and TOPSIS based on plithogenic set. Plithogenic set provides a more accurate evaluation result that addresses the uncertainty problem. Supply chain aspects were evaluated for the food industry, electronics industry, pharmaceutical industry, and textile industry.
E-commerce has been predicted to be a new driver of economic growth for developing countries. The SME sector plays a significant role in its contribution to the national economy in terms of the wealth created and the number of people employed. Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Egypt represent the greatest share of the productive units of the Egyptian economy and the current national policy directions address ways and means of developing the capacities of SMEs. Many factors could be responsible for the low usage of e-commerce among the SMEs in Egypt. In order to determine the factors that promote the adoption of e-commerce, SMEs adopters and non-adopters of e-commerce were asked to indicate the factors inhibiting the adoption of ecommerce. The results show that technical barriers are the most important barriers followed by legal and regulatory barriers, whereas lack of Internet security is the highest barrier that inhibit the implementation of ecommerce in SMEs in Egypt followed by limited use of Internet banking and web portals by SMEs. Also, findings implied that more efforts are needed to help and encourage SMEs in Egypt to speed up e-commerce adoption, particularly the more advanced applications.
In the present aggressive world of competition, knowledge management strategies are becoming the major vehicle for the organizations to achieve their goals; to compete and to perform well. Linking knowledge management to business performance could make a strong business case in convincing senior management of any organization about the need to adopt a knowledge management strategy. Organizational performance is, therefore, a key issue and performance measurement models provide a basis for developing a structured approach to knowledge management. In this respect, organizations need to assess their knowledge management capabilities and find ways to improve their performance. This paper takes these issues into account when study the role of knowledge management in enhancing the organizational performance and consequently, developed an integrated knowledge management capabilities framework for assessing organizational performance. The results show that there is positive correlation between knowledge management capabilities and organizational performance. The results also show that the proposed framework can be used to assess organizational performance and also can be used as decision tool to decide which knowledge management capability should be improved.
Similarity plays a significant implicit or explicit role in various fields. In some real applications in decision making, similarity may bring counterintuitive outcomes from the decision maker's standpoint. Therefore, in this research, we propose some novel similarity measures for bipolar and interval-valued bipolar neutrosophic set such as the cosine similarity measures and weighted cosine similarity measures. The propositions of these similarity measures are examined, and two multi-attribute decision making techniques are presented based on proposed measures. For verifying the feasibility of proposed measures, two numerical examples are presented in comparison with the related methods for demonstrating the practicality of the proposed method. Finally, we applied the proposed measures of similarity for diagnosing bipolar disorder diseases.
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