This study aims to evaluate technology innovation capabilities (TICs) of research and technology organizations (RTOs) by applying Fuzzy-DEMATEL & ANP techniques, in order to provide a practical lookout for their firm’s requirement in this regard. Based on literature review, six main criteria and eighteen sub-criteria are extracted. Fuzzy-DEMATEL is applied to analyze the casual relationships among the criteria and subcriteria. After identifying the relations between the criteria a questionnaire is developed and distributed among sixteen experts to assess the validity of the questionnaire, then the relations are weighted by ANP. It is concluded that proposed model is a comprehensive model that integrates qualitative and quantitative approaches to develop a step by step model to reach to the main TICs criteria in RTOs. Although, there are many previous researches illustrating various models to evaluate TICs, there is no formidable one using these techniques combination. Based on the abilities of the techniques and the results emerged this paper has prepared a robust model available for other RTOs to adopt as a true reference to reach to their TICs.

Despite broad improvements in construction management, claims still are an inseparable part of many con-struction projects. Due to huge cases of claim in construction industry, this study argues that claim management is a significant factor in construction projects success. In this study, the most possible causes of these emerging claims are identified and statistically ranked by Probability-Impact Matrix. Subsequently, by classifying claims in different cases, the most important ones are ranked in order to achieve a better understanding of claim management in each project. In this regard, a new index is defined, being able to be applied in a variety of projects with different time and cost values, to calculate the amount of possible claims in each project along with related ratios with respect to the cost and time of each claim. This study introduces a new model to predict the frequency of claims in construction projects. By using the proposed model, the rate of possible claims in each project can be obtained. This model is validated by applying it into fitting case studies in Iran construction industry.

The present research investigates the role of project management office in project efficiency and thus its success. The statistical population used in this work includes construction corporations active in the Iran construction industry and familiar with the concept of project management office. In such organizations, existence of the project management office and the success of their projects is firstly assessed and the role of the project management office in success of the organization's project as well as comparison of them with each other is then studied. For this purpose, a quantitative research methodology in the form of survey, along with designing a questionnaire with the help of 5-point Likert scale have been used. The results obtained indicate the existence of a highly strong linear relationship between the existence of project management office and the success of project. The results also show that the more highlighted the features of this office such as methods and standards for project management, project history archive, cooperation between employees/human resources office, project management educating and project administrative support, the more the success aspect of the project will be. Finally, the mentioned inferential statistics and qualitative features lead to generation of practical guidelines for organizations which have or are seeking to establish project management office.

This study aims to improve employee evaluation system in one of the leading automobile manufacturers in Iran by designing a fuzzy decision support system (F.D.S.S.). Since this manufacturer is a large-sized company with over 35,000 employees, the number of managers regularly evaluated requires too much capacity from the human resource team and hence increases the rate of possible misjudgements. However, the proposed F.D.S.S. can reduce the rate of unfair or inconsistent assessments by converting qualitative assessments of the panel to linguistic variables. This action increases the precision of assessment and improves the quality of evaluations. The proposed F.D.S.S. is compared with a fuzzy TOPSIS method to confirm its reliability and validity in which the results show consistency with fuzzy TOPSIS. As a result, the F.D.S.S. is implemented for evaluation of managers in this automobile company instead of the traditional method.

In this paper, financing methods used in Tehran's Renovation Organization are identified. Through repeated analysis, a combination of criteria with largest impact on all finance methods is discovered. Henceforth, AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) method is used for selecting the optimal financing method among available alternatives and also is used for improving accuracy of results. Since the objective of the current paper is to offer a model for supporting the decision-making process, sensitivity analysis is carried out in the subsequent stage to determine impact of variation of scale weights in prioritization of different projects.

The role of strategic management is to handle the day-today needs of the firms with respect to current events of fluctuating markets so that they can effectively reach to their pre-planned, long-term goals. This study aims to explain the steps taken to design a new conceptual framework in the strategic management department of the National Iranian Gas Export Company (NIGEC), as well as the main components of the conceptual framework. It first goes through the logic behind the techniques applied to design this conceptual framework, and then each component is explained as to why it works as part of an integrated conceptual framework. This new framework is part of a change regime in the organisation along with the whole oil industry in Iran aimed at contributing to directing the organisations confronted with rapidly altering environments. The insights of this study shed light on the basics of designing an adjusted conceptual framework for managers and researchers, and all companies faced with constant internal and external challenges and other characteristics of modern organisations.

In the fierce global competition, cost, quality and customer satisfaction appears to be utmost significant. Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) have a great potential in manufacturing both cost effective and customer based products. These systems bring us flexibility, but this flexibility accompanies cost and time. Thus, selecting suitable FMS necessitates excessive attention. The problem of FMS selection and evaluation becomes more difficult when facing multi FMSs selection problem. In this paper, we propose an integrated approach to find a suitable combination of FMSs in a multi FMSs decision making problem. Each FMS has several alternatives. Therefore, there are many possible solutions for this problem. We first identify the objective and subjective attributes. Second, Grey system theory is applied to deal with the incomplete and uncertain information of subjective data, and the objective data are extracted from simulation modelling. A goal-programming model is then utilized to formulate the problem and to assign priorities to the objectives. Finally, a genetic algorithm (FA) based model is applied to solve the combination problem, as the formulated problem is difficult to be solved. The model proposed in this paper determines the most appropriate FMSs combination and facilitates decision making of such a hard problem.

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