The internal and external environment of all organizations challenges them adapt to the best practices and reconsider their relationship throughout the supply chain. In this paper, the authors have tried to propose an agile strategy for the supply chain of a steel company, which ranks 3 rd in Iran in Gross Sale with 16,000 employees, in order to respond quickly to ever-changing needs. To do this, through the literature review the framework of balanced scorecard was utilized to structure agility factors in the supply chain of the steel industry. Then the experts were interviewed to reconcile on the factors identified. Utilizing 24 questionnaires by the use of Interpretive Structural Modeling framework, the relationship and sequence of factors were obtained from experts. The final model developed in the paper presents the agility factors for the steel industry supply chain. Also, these factors are grouped within the four perspectives of the BSC to better enhance the results and pursue action. The ISM method identifies the priority of each factor which provides a better understanding of the underlying relationship of the factors for the managers to implement the strategies more reliably. The proposed model for strategy formulation can be utilized in strategy formulation problems over various types of supply chain.

The object of this study was to investigate how role definition within insurance companies based in Ardabil Province is related with the performance of sale networks of the companies. In the present study, role definition based on role ambiguity and conflict scales developed by House, Schuler and Levanoni was considered as independent variables, whereas performance enhancement of sale networks in insurance companies was considered as dependent variable as based on customers' satisfaction scale and on policy selling rate. Furthermore, one main and four secondary hypotheses were developed based on the variables. Statistical sample of the study included 180 employees from sale network of insurance companies based in Ardabil Province, which were randomly selected from all 544 employees in sale network of insurance companies in the province. Questionnaires were used to collect the required data, while data analysis was accomplished by using Pearson Correlation Coefficient. Based on the results from data analysis, decreased role ambiguity and role conflict were positively and significantly related with increased customer satisfaction as well as increased policy selling. More specifically, relation between the decreased role ambiguity and increased customer satisfaction was the highest, whereas relation between the decreased role conflict and increased policy selling was found to be the lowest. Furthermore, main hypothesis of this study developed as the relation between role definition and performance enhancement of sale network of insurance companies based in Ardabil Province, had a positively significant relation with Pearson Correlation Coefficient (.471). Thus, based on results from the conducted tests, all of the study hypotheses including main and secondary ones were confirmed. In general, results from the study reveal the importance of variables such as decreased role ambiguity and role conflict on the performance enhancement of sale network of insurance companies in the province. Finally, the study provides evidences that decrease in these variables plays a key part in improving the performance of sale network in the insurance companies.

No abstract