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CONFERENCES are like committee meetings: everyone says his piece, sits clown satisfied at his own oratory and convinced that right (by which he means what he has advocated) will prevail, and then as a general rule at least, all go home and the ripples fade and nothing is done.

Testing a total of five hypotheses, the paper contributes to overall comparison of the two regimes, as it scrutinises whether these improvements have helped regulate this sector. Although it appears that, for the first time, International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) had a more timely effect than US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), multiple parameters must be taken into consideration. The banking system has additional rules that may affect financial statements, such as the Basel Accord which sets many policies closely related to the IFRS, such as deferred tax credits. In this way, this paper aim to enrich the results of these decisions, and illuminate aspects of amendments to IFRS and US GAAP in light of the crisis. Focussing on the financial sector, the author sought to critically evaluate their reactions, and to question some of their fundamental rules in practice. This is vital for accounting researchers and analysts, allowing for the first time to compare IFRS performance between Europe and the US, and make better investment evaluations.

The study sought to detect whether IFRS and US GAAP protected firms from abnormal sales arising from the outbreak of the crisis, whether the reclassification option under IFRS was an answer to the crisis, and whether IFRS and US GAAP succeeded in regulating shadow banking through their amendments. Therefore, it processes five hypotheses. In order to detect the effects of the crisis on accounting regimes, the analysis focused only on companies from the financial sector composed of the banking industry, insurance companies and shadow banking. The author included firms from Australia, Germany, Greece, the UK and the US, and collected information on 679 financial institutions for the period 2009–2013. The author settled on these time frames because the author aimed to capture IFRS performance surrounding the crisis effects in 2008 and the amendments that followed. In this way, the author applied quantitative methods using only numerical data over a given period.

The results suggest that the reclassification option was successful, helping firms to perform better amid the crisis, indicating that the manipulation of the crisis was appropriate. It seems therefore that US GAAP should have activated this option for US firms. However, the US may not have hurried to act because its banking sector seemed to recover more quickly than in Australia and Europe. Either way, both regimes need to consider speculative market cases that might have appeared during the crisis, as the author have detected cases of abnormal returns. Finally, concerning regulation of the shadow banking sector, the results seem to be encouraging only with regard to the latest improvements and only for all countries examined.

The project contributes to debate on the reactions of both IFRS and US GAAP during and after the economic crisis. For this, it addresses several questions to investigate the performance of the financial sector under both regimes, identifying possible additional effects and considerations. More specifically, it answers if the fair value orientation actually contributes to the financial crisis through contagion effects, while it addresses additional questions. Have these two global accounting regimes succeeded in overcoming the consequences of the crisis? Have amendments and the introduction of new standards to IFRS and US GAAP achieved regulation of shadow banking? Which of the two has performed better? As aforementioned, the analysis focused only on companies from the financial sector composed of the banking industry, insurance companies and shadow banking firms from Australia, Germany, Greece, the UK and the US, for the period 2009–2013.

The purpose of this study is to propose a comprehensive efficiency evaluation approach to measure the efficiency of the retailers and to determine the relative importance of a wide variety of apparel retail-specific factors that support efficiency.

The first stage of the proposed approach is the measurement of the relative efficiency of the apparel retailers by using data envelopment analysis (DEA) for identifying the best practice frontier and determination of the improvement ratios. The second stage is the prioritization of the factors that are important in the apparel retail efficiency using analytical hierarchy process (AHP).

The findings of the study revealed that the quantitative criteria to be considered for efficiency through input minimization and output maximization were “number of employees” and “profit before tax,” respectively, however, focusing on output maximization was found to be more critical. In addition, it was seen that the most important qualitative components of efficiency were satisfied customers, qualified staff and branding.

The managerial actors in the apparel retail industry can be alerted for new strategic actions to adopt best practices or take precautions for future inefficiencies with the help of the results obtained. The customized hierarchical structure allows determining the priority areas that need to be focused on for increasing the performance of apparel retailers.

In this study, DEA and AHP were combined to build a comprehensive efficiency evaluation approach in the apparel retail industry for the first time in the literature. Thus, both qualitative and quantitative variables that are important in apparel retail efficiency were put forward and evaluated. The originality of the hierarchical structure in AHP was its customization to the apparel retail industry.

The client was a large laundry or, to give it its proper name, linen service. It catered mainly for hospitals and hotels and the average monthly load handled was 180,755kg. There were three separate lines of washing‐machines, hydro‐extractors and tumble‐driers and, at the commencement of the study, the average machine utilizations of all lines were:Washing machines: 64 per cent; Hydro extractors: 63 per cent; Tumble‐driers: 42 per cent.

The purpose of this study is to represent an attempt to empirically capture the impact of disinvestment on the financial and operating performance of 26 Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) listed central public sector enterprises (CPSEs) in India which got divested through stock market mechanism during the time period of 2000–2014.

Through ratio analysis different ratios such as return on assets, return on equity, net income efficiency, debt equity, dividend payout and employment levels have been computed. Pre- and post disinvestment performance of these firms is examined through Wilcoxon signed-rank test. The present research endeavors to examine the impact of disinvestment through random effect panel data models in order to control the effect of other firm specific variables.

The overall results of the study indicate statistically significant fall in profitability ratios. The empirical results have not witnessed positive effect of disinvestment on the profitability of the CPSEs; rather, this effect has found to be negative. The possible reasons behind these negative results could be poor pre disinvestment financial health of CPSEs, negative rate of return on capital employed by PSEs and inefficiency which need to be tested empirically by future researchers.

The fact that government-owned firms are typically less proficient or at least less gainful than private-owned firms is widely hypothesized. Therefore, the disinvestment policy aims at dropping the participation of the public sector in the economic actions of the country in order to support the private sector. The present study is a first of its kind to study the impact of disinvestment on the profitability of the firms, which got divested through stock market mechanism since the year 2000 by applying both univariate and multivariate analysis.

The first in first out (FIFO) rule is an indispensable rule in the automotive industry. However, during production, the order of coming to welding operation and exiting through the painting operation is broken. Consequently, the rule of FIFO also gets broken. The purpose of this paper is to eliminate the deviations of the automotive painting process in a just in time (JIT) environment.

The paper has been solved using observations and expert’s opinions and recorded data in the real problem area. Bypass technique and express line have been used as a real problem for the minimization of these deviations. The current process and the bypass process have been compared with simulation optimization.

This paper provides analytical insights about how to prevent delays during the JIT production painting process. Delays have been prevented by using the bypass technique and express line together. The number of delays reduced with an improvement of 129. The ratio of effect (for four months) has been founded to be 0.12. The output rate has been increased from 80% to 89%.

This paper focused on the number of vehicles in the cooling area of the painting process in the study; there may occur bottleneck processes or products. It does not contain station-based bottleneck processes.

From the real-case problem, one will see that the bypass technique and the express line can be applied and generalized to many similar problems and help companies conduct their assembly lines more efficiently.

This paper is the only example that has been used to bypass technique and express line together on the paint/cooling process in a JIT production system.

Seeded Gel (SG) is a ceramic aluminium oxide manufactured by a sintering process. Each abrasive grit consists of sub‐micron size particles which under grinding force are separated from the grit. This keeps SG sharper than conventional abrasives which can dull as flats are worn on the working points. This wearing of small particles also reduces wheel wear rates and increases the G Ratio: volume of metal removed/wheel wear volume. Because sub‐micron particles are worn away, SG holds form and finish better than conventional abrasives especially at higher metal removal rates and forces. Therefore less dressing is needed, wheel life is increased and higher removal rates increase productivity. Moreover, unlike CBN which may require new truing and/or dressing methods, SG products are easily trued with single‐ or multi‐point diamonds or rotary diamond cutters nor do they require stiffer‐than‐usual machines or special equipment.

The purpose of this paper is to apply the proposed methodology to develop the product as per customer’s requirements (CRs) and increase customer satisfaction (CS).

The companies are using different methods to identify CRs and translate these requirements into new products. The Kano model is used to identify CRs. The result of the Kano model is used in quality function deployment (QFD) to decide the priority for improvements of CRs and the technical requirements.

The integration of the Kano model and QFD is applied on the mobile phone. The Kano model helps to find out the CRs which affect the CS, such as attractive (A) attribute, one (O)-dimensional attribute and must be (M) attribute. The QFD method helps to translate the CRs into technical requirements so that the designer can decide priority of requirements for improvement or new product development.

The proposed methodology can be applied to different consumers as well as industrial products.

The Kano model has been used in manufacturing as well as service sector. This work explores its usefulness and applicability for consumer and industrial products.

THERE are signs that are only too welcome that the workers of the world, tired of or fearful of continual depression, are at last prepared to take positive steps towards their solution.