Purpose – Based on theories from the innovation diffusion literature, the purpose of this paper is to develop an integrated model of electronic commerce (EC) adoption in small businesses (SBs) of developing countries. The research model specifies variables at managerial level as the primary determinants to EC adoption in SBs. Design/methodology/approach – A questionnaire-based field survey was conducted to collect data from 268 owner/managers of SBs in Iran. The data were analysed using factorial analysis. Subsequently, six hypotheses were derived and tested by hierarchical multiple regression and logistic regression analysis. Findings – Perceived benefits, perceived compatibility, perceived risks, perceived costs, and innovativeness were found to be the significant determinants of decision to adopt EC. Likewise, discussion on discriminators between adopters and non-adopters of different EC applications has been provided. Research limitations/implications – Cross-sectional data of this research tends to have certain limitations when it comes to explaining the direction of causality of the relationships between the variables. The study focuses only on the manufacturing SBs of Iran. Practical implications – The research findings have important implications for practising managers, information systems experts, and policy-makers. Governments should follow specific policies to facilitate institutionalisation of EC in SBs. Similarly, EC vendors and technology providers should collaborate with SBs to enhance the compatibility of different EC applications with specific characteristics of these businesses. Originality/value – To the best of the authors' knowledge, this paper is perhaps one of the first that examines the adoption of EC by SBs in a developing country context, using a research model which tests the effects of owner/managers' attributes on adoption of simple and advanced EC applications.

Credit markets are an essential economic institution. In developing countries, particularly in countries undergoing rapid social and economic transition, it is important to identify emerging credit demand and institute credit supply in a timely manner to facilitate economic transformation. This research focuses on the evolving rural credit market in China, where borrowing from the social network has been common but the recent economic transition has made this informal credit market inadequate in addressing rural credit needs. This research is aimed at identifying the social and economic factors that explain the farmers' credit constraint and influence farmers' decisions to switch from informal to formal credit markets. Using data from a household survey, we estimated both binary choice probit models and a multinomial probit model to explore the determinants of credit market choice and credit constraints. We found that the credit demand is significantly affected by household's production capacity as supported by the fact that household size, land size, head's education all significantly increase household's probability to borrow, but the impact of these factors varies considerably by credit market. Transaction costs have a significant, negative effect on formal credit demand. The credit constraints analysis suggest that off-farm employment, land size and the cost of the credit are the three most important factors that increase the probability of being constrained.

Plastic injection moulding is one of the most important polymer processing operations in the plastic industry today. However, lack of skill in mould making and injection moulding machine control will lead to defective plastic product. Warpage is one type of defect that usually appears in products with thickness less than 1 mm.This project is going to fabricate a mould that produced a thin plate with dimension 120 mm × 50 mm × 1 mm. The thin plate will be used for warpage testing. In mould fabrication, the mould base that purchase will be machined and assembled. After that, the mould is fixed on the injection moulding machine. The machine setting should be made to produce the product. Then, the product will be used for testing on the effective factors in warpage problem by applying the experimental design of Taguchi method.From the results, it shows that the most effective factor on the warpage is melt temperature. The filling time only slightly influenced on the warpage. The optimum parameters that can minimize the warpage defect are melt temperature (240 • C), filling time (0.5 s), packing pressure (90%) and packing time (0.6 s).

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Reliable feature correspondence between frames is a critical step in visual odometry (VO) and visual simultaneous localization and mapping (V-SLAM) algorithms. In comparison with existing VO and V-SLAM algorithms, semi-direct visual odometry (SVO) has two main advantages that lead to stateof-the-art frame rate camera motion estimation: direct pixel correspondence and efficient implementation of probabilistic mapping method. This paper improves the SVO mapping by initializing the mean and the variance of the depth at a feature location according to the depth prediction from a singleimage depth prediction network. By significantly reducing the depth uncertainty of the initialized map point (i.e., small variance centred about the depth prediction), the benefits are twofold: reliable feature correspondence between views and fast convergence to the true depth in order to create new map points. We evaluate our method with two outdoor datasets: KITTI dataset and Oxford Robotcar dataset. The experimental results indicate that the improved SVO mapping results in increased robustness and camera tracking accuracy.

The paper presents an algorithm for integrated scheduling, dispatching, and conflict-free routing of jobs and AGVs in FMS environment using a hybrid genetic algorithm. The algorithm generates an integrated schedule and detail routing paths while optimizing makespan, AGV travel time, and penalty cost due to jobs tardiness and delay as a result of conflict avoidance. The multi-objective fitness function use adaptive weight approach to assign weights to each objective for every generation based on objective improvement performance. Fuzzy expert system is used to control genetic operators using the overall population performance improvements of the last two previous generations. Computational experiments was conducted on the developed algorithm coded in Matlab to test the effectiveness of the algorithm. Integrated scheduling of jobs in FMS which are in synchrony with AGV dispatching, scheduling, and routing proved to ensure the feasibility and effectiveness of all the solutions of the integrated constituent elements.

Abstract:Human factor plays an important role in ensuring lean process management to be successful and provides good proposition for the success of the organization in the long run. One of the main elements of people is their problem solving capability in identifying and eliminating wastages. The purpose of this paper was to review problem solving capabilities in lean process management; and identifying the important factors and needs for lean process management. Beside that the paper also proposed the conceptual framework of people development system which can help organizations to enhance employees' capability in identifying and eliminating wastages continuously and effectively.