Purpose Absorptive capacity being an emerging field of research has been studied in different perspectives both in technological aspects and soft issues. Although an original study of absorptive capacity placed employees as playing pivoting role in the development of absorptive capacity (Cohen and Levinthal, 1990), unfortunately, there are limited studies on behavior of employees toward this emerging construct. This study aims to explore the impact of employees’ behavior in the development of absorptive capacity. Specifically, impact of knowledge sharing, learning adaptability and organizational commitment on absorptive capacity has been evaluated in this study. Design/methodology/approach This cross-sectional study was conducted at the pharmaceutical firms of Pakistan. The data were collected through random sampling from middle managers as a unit of analysis of this study. The rationale of the unit of analysis is that the maximum information is handled/accessed by the middle managers in the perspective of Pakistan. The data were collected from 170 respondents on a five-point Likert scale with the response rate of 66.7 per cent. Data were collected from different genders and different age groups with different qualification levels. Findings All independent variables showed significant positive correlations with overall absorptive capacity (ACAP). At the same time, different relationships of all independent variables were found in different ways with different significant levels. The results showed that different strategies may be adopted to manage the external knowledge for competition in turbulent environment. For example, organizational commitment may be incorporated at strategy formulation only, whereas the Adaptability at both routine and strategy formulation stage. As all independent variables showed no correlation with Acquisition it is concluded that Acquisition is purely a routine function, and instead of coordination, the routine processes must be emphasized. Research limitations/implications This study focused on the data from the middle managers of the pharmaceutical firms only. The results may not be generalized to the sectors. Another limitation is that the respondents of the study were middle managers. It was made intentional to see the impact of management aspects other than organizational mechanisms, as discussed by Cohen and Levinthal (1990) and Jansen et al. (2005) in their studies. The results on the basis of the data collected from other entities of the organization may differ. This is a cross-sectional study, and a longitudinal study may give different results. Practical implications Absorptive capacity has the capability to absorb new knowledge and plays an important role in the development of organizational processes to compete in the turbulent environment. It is dependent not only on technological infrastructure but also on the employees’ behaviors and attitudes. This study gives insights about the knowledge process activities and employment of human resource at each phase of absorptive capacity in relation to their behaviors toward knowledge process. Social implications Development of organizational process with knowledge management plays an important role in the capacity building, which ultimately enhances social paradigm of activities. Originality/value Pharmaceutical companies in Pakistan acquire technologies from foreign countries and have very limited research and development of their own. As technology is upgraded by the foreign companies as a continuous improvement process, local firms of Pakistan are required to absorb the new knowledge with the same pace. The study highlights importance of human capital in the development of this capability.

To meet utility demands some industrial units use onsite utility system. Traditionally, the management of such type of industrial units is carried out in three sequential steps: scheduling of the manufacturing unit by minimizing inventory, estimating the utility needs of manufacturing unit and finally operation planning of the utility system. This article demonstrates the value of an integrated approach which couples the scheduling of manufacturing unit with operational planning of the utility system. A discretetime mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is developed to compare traditional and integrated approaches. Results indicate that the integrated approach leads to significant reduction in energy costs and at the same time decreases the emissions of harmful gases.

Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem (FJSSP) is an extension of the classical Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP). The FJSSP is known to be NP-hard problem with regard to optimization and it is very difficult to find reasonably accurate solutions of the problem instances in a rational time. Extensive research has been carried out in this area especially over the span of the last 20 years in which the hybrid approaches involving Genetic Algorithm (GA) have gained the most popularity. Keeping in view this aspect, this article presents a comprehensive literature review of the FJSSPs solved using the GA. The survey is further extended by the inclusion of the hybrid GA (hGA) techniques used in the solution of the problem. This review will give readers an insight into use of certain parameters in their future research along with future research directions.

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The feasibility of heating sector integration into future highly renewable electrical grid is examined for a regional and pan-European network. A novel geographical weather dependent model for calculating the heat demand using a temporal resolution of an hour with a spatial resolution of 40x40km 2 and an optimized solution for the utilization of excess renewable generation with least energy needs is presented. Heating sector is modeled and coupled separately with two different heat coupling models, heat-pump coupling and electric-resistance coupling, both having heat-storage and gas-boiler. Results show coupling with the regional network requires least heat-storage capacity and coupling with an individual country network requires the least gas-boiler capacity. However, coupling with the pan-European network results in least balancing energy needs. It is found that heat-pump coupling provides more benefit than the electric-resistance coupling, with 4 times more heat-storage energy and 38% less requirement for the gas-boiler energy. Optimum energy mix between the heat-storage energy and gas-boiler energy suggests that the present amount of excess generation is not enough to fully support the heating sector, but if the renewable energy generation is increased by 50% then heat-storage will play an important role.

The major source of environment and economic impact of machine tools has been attributed to their energy consumption. This article, therefore, proposes a novel energy mapping approach to evaluate specific cutting energy consumption with respect to cutting parameters. Unlike the studies presented earlier, which are machine-tool-specific, this study focuses on the basic tool–workpiece interaction for energy consumption analysis. The presented energy map reveals different energy consumption regions at varying machining parameters (feed and speed) during orthogonal machining of Al 6061-T6 alloy. The chip formation analysis indicates a strong correlation with the different energy consumption regions identified on the energy map. It has been observed that feed is the major contributing factor towards shear plane angle during chip formation as compared to cutting speed. Therefore, increasing feed results in a higher shear angle and consequently lowering the specific cutting energy as indicated on the energy map. Selection of machining parameters corresponding to the lowest specific cutting energy consumption region, as identified on the energy map, can result in energy savings up to 27% per kg of material removed. The developed map can be used for selection of suitable energy-efficient cutting parameters.

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