dr. mohammad mahdavi mazdeh

Increasing uncertainty and complexity in various aspects pose significant challenges for organizations in the recent business era. Companies are faced with a dynamic environment and rapid changes affect their planning and actions. Strategic foresight as a concept and process involves understanding the future, assessing possible future events, and applying future-oriented insights for decision-making. This paper aims to develop a strategic foresight model for the Iranian pharmaceutical manufacturing industry which is considered a strategic high-tech industry at the national level.  

Expert views on shaping the prefered future of the industry in the next 15 years were analyzed using grounded theory methodology for strategic foresight modeling with an emphasis on the role of knowledge management using MAXQDA 2020 software.  

The international export-based view was identified as a key and main aspect of the paradigm model of strategic foresight for the Iranian pharmaceutical manufacturing industry. Additionally, causal conditions including recent challenges and situations, contextual and intervening conditions, strategies and actions, and results were analyzed based on grounded theory for strategic foresight for the Iranian pharmaceutical manufacturing industry.  

Transnational attitudes and views as well as export development were recognized as the main aspects of  in strategic foresight in the Iranian pharmaceutical manufacturing industry. Undesirable and inappropriate policies were identified as the most significant challenge in causal conditions. The most effective strategies for achieving the preferred future of the Iranian pharmaceutical manufacturing industry included the modification and revision of macro-policies and strategies as well as privatization.

The construction supply chain is presently the focus of considerable interest among numerous project-related businesses. Strong project management is essential for the effective completion of a project, since restricted budgets and time constraints are considered for each project. The research uses multi-objective linear programming to create a mathematical model of the building supply chain. The primary aims of the present investigation are to limit the expenses associated with logistics and to diminish the release of greenhouse gases caused by transportation. Given the reality of managing several projects concurrently, the model provided comprises a network of projects. Following the completion of each project, an inspection is arranged to assess its level of success. Estimating the costs of a project relies on several variables. In reality, there are always uncertainties highlighted in several studies about the uncertainty of cost and time parameters. This research incorporates many characteristics concurrently to simulate real-world settings and address the issue of uncertainty. The expression of uncertainty for all costs, activity length, inspection, supplier capacity, and resource demand are represented by triangular fuzzy numbers. Ultimately, the precision of the model's performance has been verified using a numerical illustration.

Recent advances in manufacturing systems and multifunction machines have caused products to be produced through several alternative process plans. Therefore, the integration of process planning and scheduling, as two of the most critical functions, becomes essential to enhance manufacturing systems’ productivity. Several different algorithms have solved the integrated process planning and scheduling (IPPS) problem in the literature. All proposed algorithms require a list of available process plans in advance (type-1). In this paper, an efficient mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is presented based on the term "combination." Besides, a type-2 priority-based heuristic algorithm (PBHA II) is proposed using dispatching rules with prioritizing jobs, combinations, and operations to solve the IPPS problems expressed by AND/OR graphs and with a makespan criterion. The MILP model and proposed heuristic algorithm are tested on the most challenging benchmark problems. Experimental results show the superiority of the MILP model over the best one in the literature, as well as the effectiveness and high performance of PBHA II. New upper bounds have been obtained in a short computational time for 7 of 24 most complex problems, which have been used by many researchers over the last two decades.

Export orientation is one of the main approaches in developing Iran's pharmaceutical industry as a key health-related part of industries. It is necessary to identify, formulate and implement some foresightful strategies and strategic plans toward adopting the export approach in the Iran pharmaceutical industry.

This paper aims to identify, prioritize and develop a structure model of foresightful export-oriented strategies and strategic plans for Iran's pharmaceutical industry.

Data gathering for identifying strategies conducted through literature review and some interviews with pharmaceutical industry experts analyzed through qualitative content analysis. Then fuzzy DEMATEL technique is used to prioritize and develop cause and effect and structure the model of identified strategies.

Policy modification, privatization, smart self-sufficiency in production, knowledge management in both national policy and industry firm's levels, and quality improvement in all aspects of production and products were identified as foresightful export-oriented strategies and plans for Iran pharmaceutical industry.

Privatization is the most effective and important foresightful export-oriented strategy in Iran's pharmaceutical industry.

The chemical attributes of Technetium-99m have made it popular for most medical imaging procedures. However, in recent years, the decay product of molybdenum-99, i.e., technetium-99m, has become expensive, and its routine availability can no longer be taken for granted. We proposed scenarios to maximize the throughput of Technetium-99m which is used to produce radiopharmaceuticals in a medical imaging center.

We proved a recursive function to imitate the decay dynamics of Technetium-99m, which is used in 80 percent of medical imaging. Then, we proved necessary and sufficient optimality analysis for this function.

We found optimal scenarios for distributing the radiopharmaceuticals into elusion periods according to clinical considerations.

 We developed a rigorous mathematical model based to maximize the throughput of radiopharmaceuticals in a molecular imaging center.

Domestic pharmaceutical industry, as one of the strategic high-technology industries, has a significant impact on individuals’ health. Despite its success in providing maximum medicine domestically, the industry, with its more than 110 active manufacturing companies in the form of semi-governmental holdings, private companies, and agile knowledge-based companies, faces challenges at the policy and operational levels. The challenges, situations, and some strengths of the industry would be identified in the present study using the scientific research method. To identify and review the challenges and status and also to explain the improvement strategies, in-depth interviews with 8 experts in the pharmaceutical industry in senior management positions in the manufacturing industry, regulators, and related syndicates planned and qualitative content analysis method using MAXQDA 2020 software platform applied to identify the challenges, situations, and strengths of the industry. According to the qualitative content analysis, challenges related to inappropriate policy-making, limited financial resources, and inappropriate pricing policies in the industry have been identified as the most important obstacles versus industry development, and on the other hand, the maximum supply of medicine in the country, appropriate knowledge  base and desirable quality of some products are listed as strengths of the industry. Efforts to reform macro policies and industry strategies at the policy and regulatory levels, including private sector development, commitment to quality improvement, and the development of new pricing methods, are among the most important future solutions to cope with the challenges of the industry.

Studies conducted by researchers show that entrepreneurship, . The main purpose of this study was to compare and compare entrepreneurship traits of students of Iran University of Science and Technology and different faculties of this university. In this research, two research tools have been investigated, the research tool is a questionnaire. This research is applied in terms of purpose and in terms of method it is a descriptive survey. The results show that although the students of this university do not have high entrepreneurship score on average, 7% of the students have these characteristics and more than 49% of the students are in relatively good condition. The results also indicate that the achievement and risk taking characteristics of Iranian university of science and technology students are more privileged and the attributes of determination, creativity and independence are in the next category. The average student entrepreneurship is not significantly different at other colleges except at the Railway School, which is more favorable than other colleges. It should be noted that entrepreneurship tools have the same results regarding entrepreneurship of students of Iran University of Science and Technology and their overlap rate is about 90%.

Along the change of world economic vision to service-based economy, service innovation is considered as a significant factor in achieving and maintaining firm’s competitive advantage. In this situation, manufacturing firms are also required to adopt a strategy to develop services to their portfolio and consider service innovation (in addition to product innovation). The main challenge of manufacturing firms involved in shifting from "product orientation" to "product and service orientation", is management of dynamic capabilities for creating service innovation. Dynamic capabilities facilitate the transformation and renewal of firms’ current processes and enable all types of innovation to create a better fit with the environment. The purpose of this study is to identify microfoundations of dynamic capabilities in service innovation and explanation the interactions between these microfoundations in an Iranian manufacturing firm (SAIPA Automotive Company). Therefore, 14 microfoundations were identified in three dynamic capability categories through deep literature reviewing. Then, the opinion of the academic and executive experts was collected using a questionnaire about the necessity and importance of each microfoundations in service innovation. Based on the opinion of the executives, the intensity and interconnectivity between these microfoundations in the context of SAIPA Automotive Company as a manufacturing firm were studied through FUZZY DEMATEL technique.

This investigation presents a heuristic method for consumable resource allocation problem in multi-class dynamic Project Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) networks, where new projects from different classes (types) arrive to system according to independent Poisson processes with different arrival rates. Each activity of any project is operated at a devoted service station located in a node of the network with exponential distribution according to its class. Indeed, each project arrives to the first service station and continues its routing according to precedence network of its class. Such system can be represented as a queuing network, while the discipline of queues is first come, first served. On the basis of presented method, a multi-class system is decomposed into several single-class dynamic PERT networks, whereas each class is considered separately as a minisystem. In modeling of single-class dynamic PERT network, we use Markov process and a multi-objective model investigated by Azaron and Tavakkoli-Moghaddam in 2007. Then, after obtaining the resources allocated to service stations in every minisystem, the final resources allocated to activities are calculated by the proposed method.