نشریه مدیریت عملیات خدمات
پیاپی 2 (زمستان 1397)

In recent years, higher education has faced dramatic changes in line with the changes in the environment. Among others, these changes include an increase in abroad higher education, more intense competition for scarce resources, and a growth in the number of universities and institutes offering these services. As a result, these institutes, like many other service organizations, need to not only pay attention to their employees’ satisfaction but also try to identify their students’ expectations and needs and offer quality services to them. Thus, the necessity of customer orientation and improvement of services quality at universities and higher education institutes has highlighted the importance of conducting research in this field. The objective of this study is the assessment of students’ satisfaction driven from internal customers and services quality. To this end, questionnaires were administered to 43 educational departments of University of Guilan (consisting of 375 students, 208 faculty members, and 86 education employees). The data were analyzed with SPSS 19 and Smart PLS 2. The results show that internal marketing directly and indirectly affects the satisfaction of the students by the mediation of both the service quality and job satisfaction of employees and faculty members.

In this research, the factors affecting the smoothing of profits in listed companies in Tehran Stock Exchange were investigated. Profit, as one of the criteria for financial decision-making, is of utmost significance and is considered as an important factor in financial investigations and judgments. Therefore, the economic outcomes of profitability reporting are inevitable. The purpose of this study is to assist investors and analysts in making proper investment decisions. In this study, correlation and multivariate linear regression model were used to examine the variables under study. The estimated period of the model was from 2011 to 2016. The statistical population of the study consisted of all of the companies accepted in Tehran Stock Exchange. As some restrictions were applied, 52 remaining companies were selected as the research sample. The results of the study using multivariate linear correlation and regression model show that during the study period, company size and asset growth rate have a positive and significant effect on profit smoothing, whereas the variables of information asymmetry, ownership structure, and impact risk are not found to have a significant effect on profit smoothing.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of satisfaction with organizational leisure time policies in the effect of work-leisure conflict on the quality of life of the administrative staff in the eastern hospitals of Guilan province. To this end, seven public hospitals in the East of Guilan province were selected as the sample.   The present study is a survey in which the required information was collected through a questionnaire. Structural equation modeling, and SPSS 20, and AMOS 22 software's were used to analyze the data.
The significance level was considered to be .05. The statistical population of this study was the administrative staff of public hospitals in eastern Guilan which consisted of 247 people. For sampling, availability sampling method was used based on the gender factor. The questionnaires were distributed among the staff. The results showed that there was a negative and significant relationship between leisure-time conflict and job satisfaction among the employees as well as work-leisure conflict and satisfaction with their leisure time. However, there was a positive and significant relationship between satisfaction with leisure time policies and job satisfaction, as well as satisfaction with leisure policies and employees’ satisfaction with their leisure time. The moderating variable of environmental characteristics, which includes satisfaction with leisure time policies of the organization, was also studied. According to the coefficient of significance and path coefficient, satisfaction with organizational policies was found to have a negative effect on the relationship between work-leisure conflict, job satisfaction, and employees’ satisfaction with their leisure time.

This study sought to investigate the importance of the elements of service marketing mix (8p) in the distributing industry of Iran and rank them by their importance and average. In line with the research objective, the present study is of descriptive type. The statistical population includes salespersons and head managers from national distributing companies. Based on the data obtained from the Association of Distributing Industries of Iran, they were 1100 people out of whom 162 individuals were chosen as the sample by Cochran formula. Following interviews with some head managers and faculty members, a 34-item questionnaire, which consists of several items for each of the 8P elements, was designed. The data were analyzed by SPSS software and each item was graded based on the important industrial indexes and the 8p elements were ranked by Friedman Test. Based on the analysis of the data, the importance of the elements of service marketing mix was identified. As a result, the product element with the average of 3.88 ranked first and the productivity and quality element with the average of 3.25 ranked last. Based on the results of the study, the activists of distributing industries can utilize the elements of marketing mix to determine the most suitable marketing strategies for their organizations and consider the weight of each element in planning their strategies.

Conversational skills in business communication are of particular importance and various factors are responsible for establishing correct relationships in business. The purpose of this study was to identify the factors affecting the communication of sales managers. This study is a descriptive-analytic one of cross-sectional type. The statistical population of the study consisted of sales managers of food and beverage companies in Guilan province, 90 of whom were randomly selected out of 176 individuals. First, based on a review of the existing literature, a conceptual model of conversational skills was designed. Then, in order to determine the content validity, the hypothetical model was presented to a group of 10 experts. The data were collected via a questionnaire of conversational skills in business communication. Initially, the questionnaire consisted of 8 factors and 70 indicators. It was corrected by a panel of experts, yielding 7 factors and 42 indicators. Then, the questionnaire was distributed to the process owners. The reliability of the questionnaire, using Cronbach's alpha in SPSS, was found to be 0.917. The result was the presentation of a model with 4 factors (individual, social, interpersonal, and emotional ones) and 20 indicators (expression of speech, insult avoidance, communication skills, etc.). The results of this study show that conversational skills are highly important in business communication and achieving the obtained indicators can be useful in the sale and success of business managers and companies.

Today, the main challenge in the field of supply chain is to focus on goods’ mobility and logistic issues. The right product should be available to the right customer in the fastest way and at the lowest cost. A supply chain consists of several components that play an important role in reducing service costs. The purpose of this paper is to minimize the cost of the supply chain, including start-up costs, holding cost, and transportation costs at different time periods. Due to the complexity of the problem, a data mining technique of improved greedy algorithm has been used to solve it. Since dealing with large databases in the supply chain management is of utmost importance, this paper has proposed the use of data mining methods in the supply chain issue. Based on the results of the present study, data mining techniques can be used effectively in different parts of the supply chain such as selecting suppliers and distributors, demand predicting, etc. The results revealed that the greedy algorithm was not able to find the best solution in the search space; therefore, a local search phase was added to improve the solution. The obtained results are indicative of the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.