The problem of designing a set of routes with minimum cost to serve a collection of customers with a fleet of vehicles is a fundamental challenge when the number of customers to be dropped or picked up is not known during the planning horizon. The purpose of this paper is to develop a vehicle routing Problem (VRP) model that addresses stochastic simultaneous pickup and delivery in the urban pub...

There is a growing body of evidence which suggests that relative to male-owned businesses, female-owned businesses suffer various disadvantages leading to their lower efficiency—the female-owned business underperformance hypothesis. Firm performance is typically measured by firm-size, labor productivity or various estimates of total factor productivity. However, a key shortcoming of this litera...

Small and informal enterprises are preponderant in Africa’s manufacturing sector. Their growth is negligibly low except when young and small, but little is known beyond this. This paper reports the results of our field study of a metalworking cluster in Nairobi. As competition was intensified by the entry of new enterprises, the education level of entrepreneurs became important in determining e...

In today's competitive market, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is widely being used by industries. However, the results of the research efforts carried out in this field reveal that the rate of successful implementations for ERP projects is low and in most cases the planned goals are not achieved. Therefore it is necessary to assess maturity of an enterprise in terms of factors affect...

In a socio-economic scenario, which is constantly evolving, the enterprise should always renovate and modernise itself at all levels, in its internal organisation and in the markets where it operates. At the Italian level, the economic development of the country calls for a reorganisation of the economic activity as a whole effectiveness, productivity and managerial culture spread. This paper i...

The rapid growth of bandwidth requirements for services like IP television and video on demand over Internet together with high speed Internet access have demand for very high bandwidth to customers as well as the changing role of enterprise networking are causing disruptive change in the enterprise local area networks. The most suitable solution for satisfying the high bandwidth demand with a ...

Direct sales channels, environmental legislation, and liberal returns policies contributed to the growth of returns flows. However, there is still a lot of re required to enrich the domain by modeling a decision framework and develop integrated architecture for product return as an enterprise system. Most of the av literature on forward supply chain system focuses mainly on physical transaction...

Communication amongst humans has evolved over thousands of years to incorporate multiple means by which people can collaborate today. Due to the geographic dispersion of business operations and ongoing corporate globalization, the need for collaborative tools has emerged. Collaborative technologies have an important role to play in improving the speed and efficiency of business and decision-mak...

The capabilities of the Internet and its associated World-wide Web have reached a level of maturity in both technology and application that they now provide the platform of choice for many services of public and private enterprise. Web services, as key elements of this platform, provide a framework and tools for transaction-oriented (primarily stateless) applications. With the emergence of the ...