The challenges confronting the training needs assessment in Saudi Arabian higher education

This research examines the problems encountered by the Training Needs Assessment (TNA) system from the perspective of faculty members and Human Resources (HR) managers in emerging public universities in the Saudi Arabian Higher Education sector. It aims to understand how problems with this will affect the success rate of Training and Development (T&D) curriculums. The research comprises an analytical study using a case study method of analysis. Qualitative data collection was carried out using semi-structured interviews with 75 senior managers and faculty members of four selected universities, selected using purposive non-random sampling. The data was analysed using Thematic Analysis (TA). The results highlight the insufficiency of the TNA techniques applied to ascertain training requirements. The primary obstacles to successful TNA were inadequate HR processes, insufficiently experienced HR directors, poor engagement, and favouritism concerning the selection of candidates for T&D. These issues affect the enthusiasm of those in the department. Additionally, resources required for T&D, particularly time and money, are misused, which could influence the growth potential of the universities against the country’s Vision 2030 plan. The findings indicate procedural differences in selecting and approving staff requests for Human Resource Development (HRD) support, managerial discretion in selecting participants for HRD programmes, and selective or restricted access to HRD programmes for foreign-born employees, which raises significant questions about equality policies. This study is unique as a contribution to the literature in exploring the challenges faced by the TNA process in Saudi Arabian Higher Education, therefore broadening understanding in the field as a whole, especially concerning the developing countries and Gulf Cooperation Council of Nations. The study concludes that there is currently unsatisfactory commitment in determining the staff training needs by the HR departments of Saudi Arabian public universities, which damages morale and leads to a lack of faith between HR directors and departmental staff. Finally, this study contributes to the area of policy decision-making by reporting the present situation surrounding the issues related to the application of TNA in T&D.

The interplay of open innovation and strategic innovation: Unpacking the role of organizational learning ability and absorptive capacity

We explore the open innovation research model in order to remove barriers in service organizations, where lack of knowledge is the main barrier to innovation. The purpose of this paper is to propose a research model exploring the relationship between open innovation, organizational learning ability, absorptive capacity, and strategic innovation. In this study, we collected data from 330 pharmaceutical companies in Lahore and Karachi (Pakistan). The Structural equation model analysis was used through analysis of moment structures and statistical package for the social sciences to check the relationship between the variables. The results reveal that hypotheses related to innovation have been accepted. The findings of this study are evidence that various types of open innovation have different effects on strategic innovation. The inbound and outbound open innovation directly affects strategic innovation; the mutual effect of exploitative learning ability and explorative learning ability between open innovation and strategic innovation have indirect effects. Similarly, the empirical findings of absorptive capacity also significantly impact open innovation and organizational learning ability. This study contributes to the theory by introducing exploitative and explorative learning abilities as mediators between open innovation and strategic innovation. Moreover, it analyzes how absorptive capacity may enhance learning abilities through the open innovation phenomenon. Practically, this study would help the managers understand and improve organizational productivity and gain competitive advantage by creating, sharing, and utilizing knowledge through internal and external avenues.

Predictions of FluSurge 2.0 methodology on hospital utilization during the Covid-19 outbreaks in several countries

Application of the Flusurge 2.0 methodology to predict the needs of conventional hospital treatment, intensive care, and respiratory support resources as a consequence of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in several countries. Different countries of the following continents have been selected: Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and Oceania. Variables: Total population and age distribution; Number of COVID19 infections; Number of deaths from COVID19; Number of non-ICU hospital beds; Number of ICU beds; Number of ventilators. Method: The proposed possible scenario planning is based on the application of FluSurge 2.0 Software, developed by The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS/CDC). Saturation of conventional hospitalization is expected in India, Uganda, Nepal, and Haiti; there is a forecast of saturation for ICU beds in all sample countries except Turkey. Ventilator saturation is expected in all countries of the sample except Argentina, Austria, Brazil, France, United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Norway, Poland, Turkey and the USA. The model shows, for a percentage greater than 50% of the countries, difficulties related to the saturation of their ICU units, and the use of ventilators.

Facility location selection for the furniture industry of Bangladesh: Comparative AHP and FAHP analysis

The furniture industry is growing to a great extent in Bangladesh. Many market researchers believe that the industry has enormous potentiality. However, the expansion of this industry may face complexities within a few years. Due to the wrong selection of facilities, many organizations failed to earn profit as expected. It also needs a large investment. Selecting a suitable place for a new facility is going to be the biggest question of upcoming years. This study aimed to analyze Bangladesh’s furniture industry, address the facility location problem, and provide a constructive solution to the decision-makers. In this study, seven criteria were considered: availability of raw materials, transportations, skilled labor, proximity to customers, energy availability, economic zone facility, and environmental impact, and five ideal locations or alternatives: Khulna, Chattogram, Bogura, Gazipur, and Manikganj. Thirty-four experts took part in the survey to analyze the significant criteria for selecting a furniture industry’s facility location and alternatives or potential locations for the facility. The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Fuzzy AHP methods (FAHP), two MCDM techniques, were used to analyze the data set. A sensitivity analysis was done to determine the model’s robustness for any critical changes in the real world. The result showed that ‘energy availability is the most significant criterion to select a facility location for the furniture industry, where it got 35.1% criteria weight in AHP and 33.9% in FAHP. ‘Chattogram’ was selected as the most suitable place containing 33.74% normalized weight in AHP and 33.81% normalized weight in FAHP.

Influence of the socio-economic environment on the entrepreneurs behavior. Cases of cuba and ecuador

Entrepreneurship is an important part of any economy today regardless of its level of development. However, not in all contexts do entrepreneurs operate in the same way, nor are they motivated by the same factors. This research seeks to identify possible coincidence factors and differences between entrepreneurs that operate in different contexts from the point of view of their historical evolution, the duration of these and the economic and social model applied in the countries. Specifically, a comparative study is carried out between entrepreneurs from the republics of Ecuador and Cuba considering various variables such as: personality characteristics (attitude to failure, risk, perseverance and innovation), use of the available time fund for work in entrepreneurship; Impact of the environment in relation to: government regulations, taxes, level of competition and availability of suppliers, as well as the structure of personal expenses projected in the short and long term that entrepreneurs assume as a stimulus for their actions. For the development of the study, a description of the behavior of the variables was initially made and later, by hypothesis testing, to verify differences and similarities between both populations. The study allowed us to identify common and divergent aspects between both populations analyzed. Similarly, it showed how differences in the administrative and financial environment in which entrepreneurs operate generate changes in their priorities and projections.

Multi-criteria decision-making model for supporting manufacturing settlements location in Africa after COVID-19

The COVID-19 emergency is affecting manufacturing industries all over the world. Notably, it has generated several issues in the products’ supply and the global value chain in African countries. Besides this, Africa’s manufacturing value-added rate grew only 1.5 since 2018, and the foreign direct investment (FDI) from multinational enterprises (MNEs) remains very low due to high-risk factors. Most of these factors are linked to a non-optimized location selection that can adversely affect plant performance. For these reasons, supporting decision-makers in selecting the suitable country location in Africa is crucial, both for contributing to countries’ growth and companies’ performance. This research aims at presenting a comprehensive multi-criteria decision-making model (MCDM) to be used by MNEs to evaluate the best countries to develop new manufacturing settlements, highlighting the criteria that COVID-19 has impacted. Thus, it has affected countries’ performance, impacting the plant location selection choices. A combination of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) methods have also been used for comparative analysis. The criteria used in the proposed approach have been validated with a panel of MNEs experts.

Combining simple motion measurement, lean analysis technique and historical data review for countering negative labor cost variance: A case study

Negative labor cost variance (NLCV) is an important problem in many manufacturing companies today. NLCV refers to the situation that expected or standard costs are less than actual labor costs in production. Management of NLCV, including the identification of causes for NLCV and the elimination or significant reduction of NLCV, is the topic discussed in this paper. The question studied in this paper is thus: what is an effective methodology in the environment of strong privacy protection to identify causes for NLCV and to significantly reduce it? The study presented in this paper proposed a methodology by combining a simple motion measurement (stopwatch), lean analysis techniques, and historical data review to study the NLCV problem. A case study was taken on a particular company called ABC to test the effectiveness of this methodology. Specifically, the result of the study revealed that (1) the employees in ABC waited for one reason or the other for almost 5 h (idle time) in a 16-h daily operation period (2 shifts running at 8 h each), which accounts for 32% of the total productive time, and (2) the elimination of the waiting time or idle time over the years concerned could account for 83% of all identified wastes in ABC. Through this case study, the effectiveness of the proposed methodology was demonstrated and the applicability of the proposed methodology was also implied.

Solving the multi-level location routing problem considering the environmental impact using a hybrid metaheuristic

The multi-level location routing problem (MLLRP) is an extension of the capacitated location routing problem (CLRP). MLLRPs are considered a class of combinatorial optimization problems that arise in transportation applications, such as agricultural logistic planning. Along with concerns regarding the environmental harmfulness, recent studies have considered “green” logistics. This paper addressed a low environmental impact model for MLLRP by considering characteristics, emissions, and traffic congestion that have not appeared in the recent literature. The mathematical model was formulated to deal with a reverse flow problem, which was a real case that occurs in Thailand agriculture. We developed a hybrid metaheuristic algorithm to solve the MLLRP by integrating a variable neighborhood search (VNS) with an adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS). The experimental results shown that the hybrid algorithm had clear advantages in the time consumption and quality of the solution. The extended study indicated that the proposed algorithm obtained competitive results compared with the previously published methods. The proposed practice is useful not only for the agricultural industry but also for other industries.

SuccERP: The design science based integration of ECS and ERP in post-implementation stage

The existing studies of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) are primarily focusing on the adoption and implementation stages, the post-implementation stage has received less attention in comparison. However, most enterprises have been struggling under the post-implementation stage. This work aims to review the state-of-the-art issues of ERP in the post-implementation stage, including communication, legacy system, collaboration, and the manager is hard to monitor the performance. Based on the Design Science (DS) method, we highlight how to offset the lack of an ERP system and ECS according to the guidelines of DS, and show the exhaustive steps for implementing the artifact-SuccERP. Our research is rigorous and interpretive by considering the steps of the DS and the functions of Software Engineering. Further, we explore multiple ERP systems to summarize the difference in authentication, initial data, and specific procedures aspects, after that, we consider the two most popular procedures (order creation and bill of purchase creation) as examples to demonstrate and evaluate the proposed artifact—SuccERP in the result. We propose the complete and practical research for solving the issues from previous theoretical results of an ERP, and to show experimentally that the proposed SuccERP is easy to maintain by applying the Cyclomatic Complexity and the Maintainability Index as metrics. This study is a milestone that allows ERP research to move from the theoretical stage to integrating, creating things that serve a human purpose, and dealing with the issues presented by previous works practically.

Simulation analysis of engineering business process in asset sustainment activities based on total cost of ownership

Major assets such as buildings, infrastructure and defence systems are long term investments that require many outsourced sustainment activities to maintain satisfactory performances over their service life. When multiplied by the number of years that the sustainment is planned to be undertaken, the contracting cost is high. Many business processes are established to govern these asset sustainment activities and eventually become the source of inefficiency. This paper analyses the performance of these processes using a performance driven approach. Combined with input data of requests for engineering change in similar assets, this paper evaluates a new business process redesigned from an existing process to achieve significant savings in total cost of ownership as well as improving other non-financial performance indicators.