Search results

In this study, we propose a tetrahedral mesh generation and adaptive refinement method for multi-chamber, multi-facet, multiscale and surface-solid mesh coupling with extremely thin layers, solving the two challenges of mesh generation and refinement in current electromagnetic simulation models.

Utilizing innovative topology transformation techniques, high-precision intersection judgment algorithms and highly reliable boundary recovery algorithms to reduce the number of Steiner locking points. The feasible space for the reposition of Steiner points is determined by using the linear programming. During mesh refinement, an edge-split method based on geometric center and boundary facets node size is devised. Solving the problem of difficult insertion of nodes in narrow geometric spaces, capable of filtering the longest and boundary edges of tetrahedrons, refining the mesh layer by layer through multiple iterations, and achieving collaborative optimization of surface and tetrahedral mesh. Simultaneously, utilizing a surface-facet preserving mesh topology optimization algorithm to improve the fit degree between the mesh and geometry.

Initial mesh generation for electromagnetic models, compared to commercial software, the method proposed in this paper has a higher pass rate and better mesh quality. For the adaptive refinement performance of high-frequency computing, this method can generate an average of 50% fewer meshes compared to commercial software while meeting simulation accuracy.

This paper proposes a complete set of mesh generation and adaptive refinement theories and methods designed for the structural characteristics of electromagnetic simulation models, which meet the needs of real-world industrial applications.

Exploring the Lean and Green relationship goes back to the beginnings of Lean manufacturing. Most cases established that companies implementing Lean have Green results. However, there are Lean practices with a higher impact on Green, but others with less impact. Therefore, this paper presents research that explores the relationship between Lean and Green in manufacturing companies and aims to determine whether Lean practices have a higher association with Green aspects.

A survey was conducted amongst manufacturing firms to determine their Lean Index (LI). The internally related elements of the Lean construct determined each firm’s LI, whilst Cronbach alpha determined internal LI consistency. The survey also identified firms developing six Green aspects: International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) 14001, ISO 50001, general Green aspects and the specific aspects of materials, energy and water. An individual sample t-test shows different LI levels of association for each Green aspect. Binomial logistic regression shows the LI element association for each Green aspect.

LI is higher at firms reporting the inclusion of Green aspects. More than half of LI components have a statistically relevant association with the six Green aspects. In general, Ishikawa diagrams had the highest association with Green aspects whilst the lowest was seen in workers as improvement initiators. By grouping the LI elements into their categories, the Lean practices related to controlling processes have a higher association, whilst the involvement of employees has the lowest.

Further research found in this paper identifies the possibilities for investigating the specificities of each Lean tool to develop Green aspects in companies.

Practitioners learn that Lean and Green are not separate issues in business. This article provides evidence that Lean practices in place at companies are already associated with Green aspects, so integration may already be happening.

This paper provides specifics on the relationship between each Lean practice and developing Green aspects. Thus, this paper specifies the Lean practices that contribute most to Green efficiency to support the joint development of both themes.

This paper explores Lean Six Sigma principles and the DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, improve, control) methodology to propose a new Lean Six Sigma 4.0 (LSS 4.0) framework for employee occupational exams and address the real-world issue of high-variability exams that may arise.

This study uses mixed methods, combining qualitative and quantitative data collection. A detailed case study assesses the impact of LSS interventions on the exam management process and tests the applicability of the proposed LSS 4.0 framework for employee occupational exams.

The results reveal that changing the health service supplier in the explored organization caused a substantial raise in occupational exams, leading to increased costs. By using syntactic interoperability, lean, six sigma and DMAIC approaches, improvements were identified, addressing process deviations and information requirements. Implementing corrective actions improved the exam process, reducing the number of exams and associated expenses.

It is important to acknowledge certain limitations, such as the specific context of the case study and the exclusion of certain exam categories.

The practical implications of this research are substantial, providing organizations with valuable managerial insights into improving efficiency, reducing costs and ensuring regulatory compliance while managing occupational exams.

This study fills a research gap by applying LSS 4.0 to occupational exam management, offering a practical framework for organizations. It contributes to the existing knowledge base by addressing a relatively novel context and providing a detailed roadmap for process optimization.

This study aims to examine the impact of corporate governance on the speed of adjustment (SOA) of capital structure in a developing market, Pakistan.

The study's sample includes 173 non-financial enterprises that were listed on the Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) between 2011 and 2020. The capital structure of the sample companies is determined by the ratio of total debt to total debt plus the market value of equity. Corporate governance is measured by board size, independence, CEO duality, management ownership, blockholders ownership and institutional ownership. A two-step difference GMM model was used to achieve the study's objectives.

Through applying the reduced form model approach, we discovered that corporate governance variables have a considerable negative impact on the speed of targeted leverage adjustment in sample firms. Additionally, to check the robustness of results, the two-stage technique used to examine this corporate governance-SOA relationship. Furthermore, we discovered that smaller enterprises modify their capital structure more than larger firms. Furthermore, corporations prioritize short-term debt adjustment above long-term debt adjustment.

The study's findings provide further information to company managers and investors on the relationship between corporate governance quality and the pace of adjustment towards targeted leverage across Pakistani enterprises. Furthermore, this study adds new information from growing countries such as Pakistan to the existing literature, which can help regulatory authorities and policymakers improve the quality of corporate governance. It is commonly known that improving the quality of corporate governance practices improves the firm's capital structure, which benefits all stakeholders.

In the context of developing economies, the academic literature lacks research that examine the impact of corporate governance on dynamic capital structure decisions. This study intends to fill this gap.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the association between company reputation and dividend policy.

In this study, sample of 98,809 firm-year observations from 22 countries covering 2005–2016 were used.

Firm reputation concerns are associated with higher propensities to pay dividends and payout ratios. Further, this positive effect is more pronounced for firms with high free cash flows, high information asymmetry and low institutional monitoring. The results are robust to an instrumental variable approach, propensity score matching and the Heckman two-stage correction approach while addressing endogeneity concerns.

These findings have significant implications for various stakeholders, such as existing and potential investors, managers, policymakers and regulators, by providing insights into the relationship between corporate reputation and firm dividend payout decisions. Corporate reputation is highlighted as crucial for accessing finance, emphasizing the role of national regulators and policymakers in facilitating firms' efforts to improve their reputation. The study highlights the dynamics of corporate reputation and dividend payout, calling for proactive engagement from regulators and policymakers. Crafting policies conducive to reputation-building can enhance firms' financial prospects, indicating the need for strategic interventions at managerial, regulatory and policy levels. Understanding the influence of economic context is crucial for firms to tailor reputation management strategies and optimize funding opportunities in different economic environments.

Overall, results suggest that reputation serves as a disciplining mechanism, where firms will pay dividends to maintain their reputations.

Formulating strategic decisions poses a significant challenge for construction organizations, profoundly impacting their overarching strategic management. The success of an organization’s strategy relies on how information is managed and decisions are executed. However, the literature has a limited understanding of the connection between information quality and strategic decision-making, particularly in construction business performance. This study aims to bridge this gap by exploring how information quality mediates the relationship between strategic decision-making and the performance of construction businesses in New Zealand.

This quantitative study aims to fill this gap by assessing how information quality shapes strategic decision-making practices, impacting construction organizations’ performance. Analysing 102 viable responses through partial least squares structural equation modeling structural equation modelling offers partial support to the research framework.

The study used statistical analysis to gauge the impact of adopting strategic management practices on construction business performance, considering the mediation of the quality of information within New Zealand’s context. It affirmed a positive correlation between strategic decision-making management and construction business performance, underpinned by the mediation of quality of information.

This study underscores the critical role of information quality in evaluating strategic decisions for bolstering construction business performance. In essence, it affirms that enhancing the performance of construction organizations via strategic decision-making is intrinsically linked to the quality of information.

This study makes a noteworthy contribution by establishing connections between decision importance, process effectiveness, information quality, intuition in decision-making and model development, providing valuable insights to the field.

Literature has paid limited attention to narcissism’s influence on tourism. The pre-trip planning stage involves temporal psychological distance, where decision-making regarding the trip stretches over a period of time and occurs anytime during that period. Using narcissism theory and with temporal distance (6 months and 1 week before the trip) as the moderator, this study examines how tourists’ self-sacrificing self-enhancement and grandiose fantasy – grandiose narcissism facets – and travel motivations affect attraction visit intentions.

Partial least squares (PLS) analysis was applied on survey information obtained from 374 individuals (200 and 174 were six-months and one-week scenarios, respectively).

Grandiose narcissism facets affect motivations and visit intentions to various attractions at different temporal distances. The consequences of grandiose fantasy and self-sacrificing self-enhancement on motivation become evident as temporal distance decreases. At large temporal distances, grandiose fantasy positively influences social recognition motivation. At short temporal distances, it positively influences social recognition and ego and negatively influences scenery and relaxation motivations. Self-sacrificing self-enhancement positively influences socialization, exploration, scenery, relaxation and escape motivations at large temporal distances. At short temporal distances, self-sacrificing self-enhancement positively influences historical attraction visit intentions.

Grandiose narcissism facets’ influence on tourism is rarely examined. This study extends the temporal distance concept to the narcissism theory. It integrates the effects of grandiose narcissism and temporal distance on tourists’ motivations and different attraction type visit intentions and shows that motivation is temporally distance-specific.

Remuneration policies may differ from country to country, and their effect on bank stability could be due to the legal framework. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how the legal system impacts the relationship between CEO compensation and bank stability across countries.

To test the study hypotheses, the authors use panel data of 74 banks operating in ten OECD countries during the period 2009–2016 and apply the generalized moments method regression model to better remediate the endogeneity problem.

The findings confirm that a country’s banking regulations significantly affect its bank stability. Common law countries have less bank stability than civil law countries. This result can be interpreted by the fact that, in common-law countries, banks’ CEO are strongly protected by the law, so they allocate a large part of bank assets to risky loans to improve their variable remuneration.

The research can help policymakers understand bank stability in one country. Any legal reform would require prior knowledge of how risk-taking may arise in executive compensation.

The contribution is to explain the controversial effect of executive compensation on bank stability in the framework of legal theory. The authors argue that regulators should monitor compensation structures and that the country’s legal origin of law shapes the CEO compensation structure and is a determinant of bank stability. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no studies exploring this field. So, this study tries to shed more light on the dark side of CEOs’ behavior when undertaking risky projects to maximize their remuneration.

Companies should enhance their market position and competitiveness by improving staff effectiveness, skills, resource commitment, and applying relevant managerial methods. This study aims to examine the impact of knowledge management (KM) and total quality management (TQM) on employee effectiveness (EE) and supply chain performance (SCP) in emerging economies.

The used methodology consists on conducting a survey within Tunisian companies, where the authors gathered 206 responses. Collected data was analyzed using statistical package for the social sciences (SPSS) software, enabling the authors to establish a conceptual model. This model was further examined through structural equation modeling, using analysis of moment structures (AMOS) software for hypothesis validation. Additionally, the authors’ research aimed to enhance SCP and boost EE while minimizing costs through a nonlinear mathematical model and the quality function deployment method.

The results indicate that TQM and KM positively impact EE, and KM and EE positively impact SCP. However, the significance of employee performance on SCP varies depending on company location and industry sector studied.

This work emphasized the involvement of small- and medium-sized enterprise managers from emerging economies in the studied concepts and confirmed the effects of KM and TQM practices on EE and SCP.

It is important to understand the factors that are significant in supply chain (SC) collaboration decision making and whether supply chain collaborative factors that are considered in the literature are still valid. To date, SC collaboration has not been extensively studied in the literature with supply chain finance (SCF) factors to evaluate SCF performance. Therefore, in this paper, the authors investigate the interrelationships between SCF and supply chain collaborative (SCC) factors for achieving SCF performance. The authors identified the most important factors from the literature on SCF and SCC and with inputs from experts in the textile industry in Pakistan.

The authors employed the Gray-Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory approach to help examine the cause-and-effect relationship between the factors and identify the influence of each factor on the others.

The findings showed that the most prominent factors of the study are “level of digitalization”, “information sharing”, and “collaborative communication”, and “most effect factors of this study are incentive alignment” and “information quality”. Furthermore, the “Level of digitalization” was identified as the factor with the central role and most significant correlation with other factors.

The major implication of the study is that textile industries should effectively develop their supply chain decisions after analyzing their internal and external factors, which will help in developing strategies that will facilitate better management of SCF relationships. The limitations of the study are that only 15 SCF and supply chain collaborative factors were considered, and time and scope are also limited. This study is only applied in the textile industry, so generalization may be limited.

To date, this study is the only one that has taken into consideration SCC with SCF factors to evaluate supply chain performance. This paper therefore makes this initial attempt and original contribution to this discussion, which can be helpful for those working to enhance supply chain performance, such as practitioners and policymakers.