PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to address the knowledge management (KM) challenges faced by the administration of a small university which does not have a mature research culture.Design/methodology/approachThe paper follows both technocratic as well as ecological approaches to develop a sustainable KM. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis has been used to assess the problem environment.FindingsThe paper investigates the main issues faced by a small university to enhance its research reputation and identifies key components of a KM system that can be established to achieve these objectives.Research limitations/implicationsKM is of paramount importance for most organizations and a university is no exception. Although knowledge is constantly being accumulated but it cannot be taken for granted. In the absence of a KM system to facilitate the growth and transfer of knowledge, knowledge base can easily be eroded. This is truer for universities engaged in imparting applied knowledge in business, trades, and technology‐related areas.Originality/valueMost of the reported applications of KM in the education sector are limited to localized applications of information technology (IT). The present paper provides a comprehensive approach for institute‐wide KM by looking at the problem from both the ecological as well as the IT perspective, therefore, providing a more sustainable KM culture. There‐in lies the value of this paper.

Due to the increased emphasis on technology, modern manufacturing processes are no longer labor intensive. Therefore, the traditional cost estimation approaches based on volumetric measures are inadequate to asses the costs accurately. Contemporary approaches such as activity based costing have been suggested that track hidden costs by relating them to the specific activities, thus providing a much more realistic estimation for manufacturing costs. Since activity based costing does not assign cost of under-utilized resources to customers, the issue of resource under-utilization remains unaddressed. The present paper recognizes resource under-utilization cost to be an important consideration in order to identify the potential bottlenecks in the manufacturing process. This paper proposes an activity based costing model to identify resource under-utilization assuming normally distributed demand. In light of futuristic uncertainty about order sizes and in order to validate the proposed model, a discrete-event simulation approach has been presented.

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SUMMARYWarehouse location and retailer allocation is a high-level strategic decision problem that is commonly encountered by logisticians and supply chain managers, especially during the supply chain design phase. Considering the product distribution cost and warehouse capital cost trade-offs, this paper models the warehouse location and retailer allocation problem as a 0-1 integer programming problem and provides an efficient two-stage set covering heuristic algorithm to solve large-sized problems. Finally, concluding remarks and some recommendations for further research are also presented.

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