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The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate linkage among productivity, quality, and business performance in home-based brassware units in India.

This study involved action research of home-based brassware units applying procedures for three-stage least-squares (3SLS) regression analysis, with data obtained through questionnaire survey based on convenience sampling.

This study has supported the established belief that quality leads to productivity, and subsequently productivity leads to better business performance for home-based brassware units in India. The consistent and logical result of this study using 3SLS regression analysis has provided empirical understanding of the appropriate linkage among productivity, quality, and business performance.

This study has limitations of findings, as it studied the home-based brassware units in the Indian context only.

This study implies that marketable home-based brassware products are to be produced by taking into account boundaries of production within the framework of goals and value created by motivation and dependability for monitoring the business performance. Identifying an appropriate linkage among productivity, quality, and business performance may project a holistic evaluation of the policy development related to home-based brassware units.

This is an original study to test empirical linkages among productivity, quality, and business performance using 3SLS regression analysis particularly for home-based brassware units in India.

Infrastructural revolution, intense competition and customer attraction towards organised apparel retailing in India are potentially affecting traditional retailing. The authors seek to identify the factors that customers perceive during shopping in organised apparel retail store. This study also investigates the indirect effects of identified factors on behavioural outcomes such as loyalty.

The study randomly selected the customers immediately after shopping to minimise the experience's carryover effects. A sample of 648 customers was collected. Data were analysed using multivariate analysis of covariance.

The study has found that in-store logistics is the second order factor with ease of return, on-shelf availability, product accessibility, shopping convenience, and product information as the variables. The result shows that in-store logistics, store environment, store communication, merchandise assortment, perceived price and employee attribute influence customer satisfaction. As expected, these factors indirectly influence the loyalty.

This study focused on organised multi-brand apparel retailing, and the survey was conducted in a tier-II city of India only. Hence, any attempt to generalise the findings must be undertaken with caution.

In the context of multi-brand retailing, competition is fierce. New entrants and traditional apparel retailers hesitate to adopt organised apparel retailing. The findings of this study can be helpful for new entrants and traditional apparel retailers to adopt organised apparel retailing.

Previous studies in the field of multi-brand retailing have mainly focused on the marketing aspect of retail stores. This study contributes to the operations aspect and tests the impact of operational function (in-store logistics) on customer satisfaction.

In the present work, we focus on developing an in-house parallel meshless local Petrov-Galerkin (MLPG) code for the analysis of heat conduction in two-dimensional and three-dimensional regular as well as complex geometries.

The parallel MLPG code has been implemented using open multi-processing (OpenMP) application programming interface (API) on the shared memory multicore CPU architecture. Numerical simulations have been performed to find the critical regions of the serial code, and an OpenMP-based parallel MLPG code is developed, considering the critical regions of the sequential code.

Based on performance parameters such as speed-up and parallel efficiency, the credibility of the parallelization procedure has been established. Maximum speed-up and parallel efficiency are 10.94 and 0.92 for regular three-dimensional geometry (343,000 nodes). Results demonstrate the suitability of parallelization for larger nodes as parallel efficiency and speed-up are more for the larger nodes.

Few attempts have been made in parallel implementation of the MLPG method for solving large-scale industrial problems. Although the literature suggests that message-passing interface (MPI) based parallel MLPG codes have been developed, the OpenMP model has rarely been touched. This work is an attempt at the development of OpenMP-based parallel MLPG code for the very first time.

The purpose of the present study is to analyze the mixed convection water boundary layer flows over moving vertical plate with variable viscosity and Prandtl number. The non-linear partial differential equation governing the flow and thermal fields are presented in non-dimensional form by using appropriate transformation. The quasi-linearization technique in combination with implicit finite difference scheme has been adopted to solve the nonlinear-coupled partial differential equation. The numerical results are displayed graphically to illustrate the influence of various non-dimensional physical parameters on velocity and temperature. Further, the numerical results for local skin-friction coefficient and local Nusselt number are also reported. The present findings are compared with previously reported results, and these comparisons are found to be in excellent agreement.

The nonlinear partial differential equations governing the flow and thermal fields have been solved numerically using the implicit finite difference scheme in combination with the quasi-linearization technique. The numerical results are presented in terms of skin friction and heat transfer rate which are useful in determining the surface heat requirements for stabilizing the laminar boundary layer flow over a moving plate in water.

The effect of the ratio of free-stream velocity to the composite reference velocity is significant on the velocity profile. Near the wall region, as ratio of free stream velocity to composite reference velocity increases form 0.1 to 0.5, the velocity overshoot gets enhanced from 3 per cent to 41 per cent. The influence of buoyancy parameter and ration of free stream velocity to composite reference velocity on temperature profile is comparatively less than on velocity profiles. The increase in the skin friction coefficient is dependent on the increase in the value of ratio of free stream velocity to composite reference velocity if the buoyancy parameter λ is fixed and vice versa and increases in ΔT results in a decrease in N and Pr.

The present investigation is to deal with the solution of steady laminar water boundary layer flows over a moving plate with temperature-dependent viscosity and Prandtl number applicable for water using practical data. The fluid considered here is water, as it is one of the most common working fluids found in engineering applications.

The work presents a novel implementation of the generalized minimum residual (GMRES) solver in conjunction with the interpolating meshless local Petrov–Galerkin (MLPG) method to solve steady-state heat conduction in 2-D as well as in 3-D domains.

The restarted version of the GMRES solver (with and without preconditioner) is applied to solve an asymmetric system of equations, arising due to the interpolating MLPG formulation. Its performance is compared with the biconjugate gradient stabilized (BiCGSTAB) solver on the basis of computation time and convergence behaviour. Jacobi and successive over-relaxation (SOR) methods are used as the preconditioners in both the solvers.

The results show that the GMRES solver outperforms the BiCGSTAB solver in terms of smoothness of convergence behaviour, while performs slightly better than the BiCGSTAB method in terms of Central processing Unit (CPU) time.

MLPG formulation leads to a non-symmetric system of algebraic equations. Iterative methods such as GMRES and BiCGSTAB methods are required for its solution for large-scale problems. This work presents the use of GMRES solver with the MLPG method for the very first time.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the force convection laminar boundary layer flow on irregular boundary in diverging channel with the presence of magnetic field effects. Effects of various fluid parameters such as suction/injection, viscous dissipation, magnetic parameter and heat source/sink on velocity and temperature profiles are numerically analyzed. Moreover, numerically investigated on skin-friction and heat transfer coefficients when suction/injection occur.

The governing coupled partial differential equations are transformed to dimensionless form using non-similarity transformations. The non-dimensional partial differential equations are linearized by quasi-linearization technique and solved by varga's algorithm with numerical finite difference scheme on a non-uniform mesh.

The computation results are presented in terms of temperature, heat transfer and skin friction coefficients; these are useful for determining surface heat requirements. It was found that, in finite difference scheme for non-uniform mesh with quasi-linearization technique method gives smoothness of solution compared to finite difference scheme for uniform mesh, and this evidence is graphically represented in Figure 2.

The impacts of viscous dissipation (Ec) and magnetic parameter (Ha) on temperature profiles, skin friction and heat transfer are analyzed, which determine the heat generation/absorption to ensure the MHD flow of the laminar boundary layer on irregular boundary over a diverging channel.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of corrugation, wave number, initial stress and the heterogeneity of the media on the phase velocity of the Love-type wave. Moreover, the paper aims to have a comparative study of the presence and absence of anisotropy, heterogeneity, corrugation and initial stress in the half-space, which serve as a focal theme of the study.

The present paper modelled the propagation of the Love-type wave in a corrugated heterogeneous monoclinic layer lying over an initially stressed heterogeneous transversely isotropic half-space. The method of separation of variables is used to procure the dispersion relation.

The closed form of dispersion relation is obtained and found to be in well agreement to the classical Love wave equation. Neglecting the corrugation at either of the boundary surfaces, expressions of the phase velocity of the Love-type wave are deduced in closed form as special cases of the problem. It is established through the numerical computation of the obtained relation that the concerned affecting parameters have significant impact on the phase velocity of the Love-type wave. Also, a comparative study shows that the anisotropic case favours more to the phase velocity as comparison to the isotropic case.

Although many attempts have been made to study the effect of corrugated boundaries on reflection and refraction of seismic waves, but the effect of corrugated boundaries on the dispersion of surface wave (which are dispersive in nature) propagating through mediums pertaining various incredible features still needs to be investigated.

The purpose of this paper is to theoretically analyze the propagation of Love-type wave in an irregular piezoelectric layer superimposed on an isotropic elastic substrate.

The perturbation technique and Fourier transform have been applied for the solution procedure of the problem. The closed-form expressions of the dispersion relation have been analytically established considering different type of irregularities, namely, rectangular and parabolic for both the cases of electrically open and short conditions.

The study reveals that the phase velocity of Love-type wave is prominently influenced by wave number, size of irregularity, piezoelectric constant and dielectric constant of an irregular piezoelectric layer. Numerical simulation and graphical illustrations have been effectuated to depict the pronounced impact of aforementioned affecting parameters on the phase velocity of Love-type wave. The major highlight of the paper is the comparative study carried out for rectangular irregularity and parabolic irregularity in both electrically open and short conditions. Classical Love wave equation has been recovered for both the electrical conditions as the limiting case when both media are elastic and interface between them is regular.

The consequences of the study can be utilized in the design of surface acoustic wave devices to enhance their efficiency, as the material properties and the type of irregularities present in the piezoelectric layer enable Love-type wave to propagate along the surface of the layer promoting the confinement of wave for a longer duration.

Up to now, none of the authors have yet studied the propagation of Love waves in a piezoelectric layer overlying an isotropic substrate involving both parabolic and rectangular irregularities. Further, the comparative study of rectangular irregularity and parabolic irregularity for both the cases of electrically open and short conditions elucidating the latent characteristics is among the major highlights and reflects the novelty of the present study.

Recently, with a high volume of users and user’s content in Community Question Answering (CQA) sites, the quality of answers provided by users has raised a big concern. Finding the expert users can be a method to address this problem, which aims to find the suitable users (answerers) who can provide high-quality relevant answers. The purpose of this paper is to find the expert users for the newly posted questions of the CQA sites.

In this paper, a new algorithm, RANKuser, is proposed for identifying the expert users of CQA sites. The proposed RANKuser algorithm consists of three major stages. In the first stage, folksonomy relation between users, tags, and queries is established. User profile attributes, namely, reputation, tags, and badges, are also considered in folksonomy. In the second stage, expertise scores of the user are calculated based on reputation, badges, and tags. Finally, in the third stage, the expert users are identified by extracting top N users based on expertise score.

In this work, with the help of proposed ranking algorithm, expert users are identified for newly posted questions. In this paper, comparison of proposed user ranking algorithm (RANKuser) is also performed with other existing ranking algorithms, namely, ML-KNN, rankSVM, LDA, STM CQARank, and EV-based model using performance parameters such as hamming loss, accuracy, average precision, one error, F-measure, and normalized discounted cumulative gain. The proposed ranking method is also compared to the original ranking of CQA sites using the paired t-test. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed RANKuser algorithm in comparison with the existing ranking algorithms.

This paper proposes and implements a new algorithm for expert user identification in CQA sites. By utilizing the folksonomy in CQA sites and information of user profile, this algorithm identifies the experts.

The aim of this paper is, first, the desire to present the issue of retail sector competitiveness with the simultaneous determination of factors having an impact on competitiveness and their development. The main aim is to identify the factors and relationships among those factors to strengthen the competitive positioning of apparel retail stores.

The literature review and experts’ opinion helped to identify the key factors. The relationships among the factors were obtained by using interpretive structural modelling (ISM). Experts’ opinions were collected again for the fuzzy direct relationship matrix. Factors were further classified by driver and dependence power using the fuzzy matrix of cross-impact multiplications applied to classification (FMICMAC) analysis.

Total nine strengthening factors (SFs) identified here, and developed an integrated model using ISM and classified it into four clusters with the help of driver and dependence power. The model hierarchy shows the interrelationships among these SFs. The retail environment, Information and Communication Technology, technology adoption and human resource management were found to be the most significant factors needing some spotlight by the top-level authority.

The study will help managers to understand the variables and their relationships and to select the right factors to achieve a potential competitive position. Relationships among the factors were obtained through the opinions of experts and academicians. Expert opinion is a subjective judgement, and biasing in judgement might affect the result.

The research presents the first kind of an integrated model using ISM and FMICMAC to identify nine factors and classify them by their driving and dependence power. The developed model helps in the identification, classification and selection of factors as per requirement. This study will assist managers to understand the variables and their relationships and to select right factors to achieve a potential competitive position.