Purpose -Managers encounter many decisions that require the simultaneous use of different types of data in their decision-making process. A critical decision area for managers is the performance evaluation of personnel, whether individually or as a member of a team. Performance evaluation is critically essential for the effective management of the human resource of an organization and evaluation of staff that help develop individuals, improve organizational performance, and feed into business planning. Design/methodology/approach -Performance evaluations require and often involve disparate types of information that are vague, incomplete, objective, and subjective. This paper proposes a performance evaluation system of employees considering various performance evaluation criteria using fuzzy logic. The main task in the proposed approach involves determining the performance indices of employees considering their respective performance in various qualitative and quantitative evaluation criteria and then selecting the best employee who holds highest performance index comparing all the indices. Findings -A model is developed for any kind of organization where performance evaluation is significantly important for staff motivation, attitude and behavior development, communicating and aligning individual and organizational aims, and fostering positive relationships between management and staff. Fuzzy control is used to determine the overall performance index by combining results of the performance in selected criteria and provided it in numerical values which will undoubtedly ensure convenience of the concerned human resource personnel during performance rating calculation. Originality/value -This is the first time, a performance evaluation model is developed using fuzzy approach for any kind of organization where performance evaluation is significantly important for staff motivation, attitude and behavior development, communicating and aligning individual and organizational aims, and fostering positive relationships between management and staff.

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Objective To identify physiological correlates to stress in intensive care unit nurses. Background Most research on stress correlates are done in laboratory environments; naturalistic investigation of stress remains a general gap. Method Electrodermal activity, heart rate, and skin temperatures were recorded continuously for 12-hr nursing shifts (23 participants) using a wrist-worn wearable technology (Empatica E4). Results Positive correlations included stress and heart rate (ρ = .35, p < .001), stress and skin temperature (ρ = .49, p < .05), and heart rate and skin temperatures (ρ = .54, p = .0008). Discussion The presence and direction of some correlations found in this study differ from those anticipated from prior literature, illustrating the importance of complementing laboratory research with naturalistic studies. Further work is warranted to recognize nursing activities associated with a high level of stress and the underlying reasons associated with changes in physiological responses. Application Heart rate and skin temperature may be used for real-time detection of stress, but more work is needed to validate such surrogate measures.

With the development of faster means of communication, better quality computers and rapid transportation systems, manufacturing is no longer restricted at local level, but has become global in character. As a manufacturing company has to become competitive for its survival, it has to supply products of consistent high quality at reliable and reduced delivery time. Market also demands more product variants that means reduced lot size and high flexibility in operations. Manpower cost has also risen. All these factors tend to increase the product cost. However, the industry has to maintain the cost at a reasonable level. Confronting these challenges, companies worldwide are forced to find ways to reduce costs, improve quality, and meet the everchanging needs of their customers. One successful solution has been the adoption of Justintime (JIT) manufacturing strategy in which many functional areas of a company such as manufacturing, engineering, marketing, purchasing etc. are involved. In this paper, literature review on research works based on JIT was carried out and presented. The introductory section deals with the philosophy of JIT, and the concept involved in Kanban optimization and later this paper reviews literature on optimization Technique in JIT implementation.

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Supply disruption occurs for diverse reasons including transportation problem, equipment failure, raw material shortages, natural calamities etc. As a result supplier may become unavailable at random times for random time length. In addition, suppliers may also have random capacities leading to uncertain yield in orders. Again under random supplier capacities, the retailer should order from a number of suppliers in order to diversify the risk associated with shortages. The objective of this paper is to develop an inventory model for two suppliers with random capacities considering supply disruption. A modified (Q, r) model is developed to tackle the problem of future supply uncertainty in response to the demand generated by Poisson process. Two suitable optimisation algorithms are applied to search for the optimal values of the decision variables which are state dependent order quantities and reorder point to minimise the cost per unit time. A hypothetical example and its solution are then provided to have a better understanding about the demonstration of the proposed model. Finally, sensitivity analysis is also carried out to have better insights about the model developed.

Inventories are the materials stored either waiting for processing or experiencing processing and in some cases for future delivery. Inventories are treated both as blessings and evil. As they are like money placed in a drawer, assets tied up in investments, incurring costs for the care of the stored material and also subject to spoilage and obsolescence there have been a spate of programs developed by industries, all aimed at reducing inventory levels and increasing efficiency on the shop floor. Nevertheless, they do have positive purposes such as stable source of input required for production, less replenishment and may reduce ordering costs because of economies of scale. Finished goods inventories provide for better customer service. So formulating a suitable inventory model is one of the major concerns for an industry. Again considering reliability of any process is an important trend in the current research activities. Inventory models could be both deterministic and probabilistic and both of which must account for the reliability of the associated production process. This paper discusses the major works in the field of inventory modeling driven by reliability considerations, which ranges from the very beginning to latest works just published.