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BackgroundDetermining the most suitable anesthesia method for circumcision surgery plays a fundamental role in pediatric surgery. This study is aimed to present pediatric surgeons’ perspective on the relative importance of the criteria for selecting anesthesia method for circumcision surgery by utilizing the multi-criteria decision making methods.MethodsFuzzy set theory offers a useful tool for transforming linguistic terms into numerical assessments. Since the evaluation of anesthesia methods requires linguistic terms, we utilize the fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and fuzzy Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). Both mathematical decision-making methods are originated from individual judgements for qualitative factors utilizing the pair-wise comparison matrix. Our model uses four main criteria, eight sub-criteria as well as three alternatives. To assess the relative priorities, an online questionnaire was completed by three experts, pediatric surgeons, who had experience with circumcision surgery.ResultsDiscussion of the results with the experts indicates that time-related factors are the most important criteria, followed by psychology, convenience and duration. Moreover, general anesthesia with penile block for circumcision surgery is the preferred choice of anesthesia compared to general anesthesia without penile block, which has a greater priority compared to local anesthesia under the discussed main-criteria and sub-criteria.ConclusionsThe results presented in this study highlight the need to integrate surgeons’ criteria into the decision making process for selecting anesthesia methods. This is the first study in which multi-criteria decision making tools, specifically fuzzy AHP and fuzzy TOPSIS, are used to evaluate anesthesia methods for a pediatric surgical procedure.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12911-017-0409-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of demand uncertainty on inventory turnover performance through empirical modeling. In particular the authors use the inaccuracy of quarterly sales forecasts as a proxy for demand uncertainty and study its impact on firm-level inventory turnover ratios. Design/methodology/approach-The authors use regression analysis to study the effect of various measures on inventory performance. The authors use a sample financial data for 304 publicly listed US retail firms for the 25-year period from 1985 to 2009. Findings-Controlling for the effects of retail segments and year, it is found that inventory turnover is negatively correlated with mean absolute percentage error of quarterly sales forecasts and gross margin and positively correlated with capital intensity and sales surprise. These four variables explain 73.7 percent of the variation across firms and over time and 93.4 percent of the within-firm variation in the data. Practical implications-In addition to conducting an empirical investigation for the sources of variation in a major operational metric, the results in this study can also be used to benchmark a retailer's inventory performance against its competitors. Originality/value-The authors develop a new proxy to measure the demand uncertainty that a firm faces and show that this measure may help to explain the variation in inventory performance.