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Supply chain management (SCM) has gained a tremendous amount of attention from both industries and researchers since the last decade. Until now, there are numerous papers, articles, and reports that address SCM, but there is still a lack of integration between the existing performance measurement methods and practical requirements for the SCM. An innovative performance measurement method is proposed to provide necessary assistance for performance improvement in SCM. The proposed method will address this purpose in these four aspects: a simplified supply chain model; tangible and intangible performance measures in multiple dimensions; a cross-organizational performance measurement; and fuzzy set theory and weighted average method.

Shearography and thermography are optical techniques, both proven to be valuable tools for material nondestructive evaluation. Papers on these topics, however, are scattered and mainly appeared in optical journals. For the convenience of the materials community, this paper aims to present a comprehensive review of shearography and active thermography and their applications in nondestructive evaluation of materials. Both techniques enjoy the merits of full-field, non-contact and allowing speedy detection of material defects in metal, non-metal as well as composites materials. However, they are fundamentally different in flaw detection mechanisms. Shearography measures materials' mechanical response to stresses, whereas active thermography measures material's heat-transfer response to an instantaneous thermal excitation. A comparison of the advantages and limitations of two techniques for nondestructive evaluation will also be presented.

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Supplier selection has increasingly been regarded as one of the most important strategies in the globalization era. While many companies require different resources from the supply market, airline companies require supplies of parts and repair and maintenance services. The suppliers of these products and services are regarded as critical for the industry. With the multidimensional nature of the problem, supplier selection involves both tangible and intangible selection criteria. This paper presents a case study on solving the supplier selection problem in the airline industry through a decision support system that employs the analytical hierarchy process (AHP). The system was implemented with the aid of the commercial software package Expert Choice. The significance of the study is to provide a new platform for airline companies in selecting suppliers on the basis of the proposed decision support system, which was tested with a Hong Kong-based airline company during the course of development. In addition, the model highlights the areas of most concern to airline companies in supplier selection. Unlike many similar studies, sensitivity analysis has been performed in order to improve the robustness of the results, and to understand the importance of different criteria with respect to the selected decision.