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EFQM Excellence model literature indicates that using the management tools that are relevant to the organization's needs has become a strategic issue for companies in today's competitive environment. By choosing and applying the best management tools among too many management tools, companies can improve their performances and then increase customer satisfaction and gain market shares. The aim of this research is to propose an original approach for the management tools selection based on the quality function deployment (QFD) approach, a methodology which has been successfully adopted in new products development. Specifically, the research addresses the issue of how to deploy the house of quality (HOQ) to effectively and efficiently improve management tools selection processes and thus company satisfaction about its excellence achievement. Fuzzy logic is also adopted to deal with the vagueness nature of the qualitative linguistic judgments required in the proposed HOQ. The model of this research has been tested by means of a real case application, which refers to an Iranian company operating in the automotive industry in this case the mixture of 15 categories of management tools with five EFQM enabler criteria has been characterized by using of the research model. And also the test of the hypothesis of this research has been done by using spearman correlation coefficient.

Research highlights? We propose FQFD approach for both external and internal service innovations issue. ? "Food Quality" represents the ability of its innovation and outperforms other service innovation designs. ? "Sanitation" emerged as the strategic action with the highest implementation priority. ? Fuzzy logic is a very flexible tool to handle as cost estimation for service designs. Tourists' service management has become a strategic issue for hospitality industry in tourism management field. By improving accommodation performances, hospitality firms increase customer satisfaction and gain market shares. Nonetheless, most previously proposed or introduced research paradigms have focused on tourists without equally emphasizing the intra-organizational service quality and delivery processes. The aim of this paper is to propose an approach for both external and internal service management issue and service innovations based on the framework of Fuzzy Quality Function Deployment (FQFD), a methodology that has been successfully adopted in new service development. Specifically, the paper addresses the issue of how to deploy the House of Quality (HoQ) to improve accommodation service innovation processes and tourist satisfaction effectively and efficiently. Fuzzy logic is a methodology to deal with the ill-defined nature of the tourist linguistic judgments required in the proposed HoQ. The tourism case in island accommodation demonstrates the implementation of the proposed FQFD. The effective and appropriate accommodation directions for service innovation designs acquired by applying the proposed FQFD, thus, enable hotels managers to achieve a competitive advantage.

For most of managers purchasing is a strategic issue. Thus, to select the suitable suppliers has strategic importance for every company. The objective of supplier selection is to reduce purchasing risk, maximize overall value to the purchaser and build a long term, reliable relationship between buyers and suppliers. Many methods have been proposed and used for supplier evaluation and selection; most of them try to rank the suppliers from the best to the worst and to choose the appropriate supplier(s). Supplier evaluation and selection is a complex and typical multi criteria decision-making problem. Because of human judgment needs in many area of supplier selection such as preferences on alternatives or on the attributes of suppliers or the class number and borders supplier selection becomes more difficult and risky. In this study, a new tool for supplier selection is proposed. In this paper, we applied Fuzzy Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART)'s classification ability to the supplier evaluation and selection area. The proposed selection method, using Fuzzy ART not only selects the most appropriate supplier(s) and also clusters all of the vendors according to chosen criteria. To explain the Fuzzy ART method a real-life supplier selection problem is solved and suppliers are categorized according to their similarities. The obtained results show that the proposed method is well suited as a decision-making tool for supplier evaluation and selection problem.

The weapon selection problem is a strategic issue and has a significant impact on the efficiency of defense systems. On the other hand, selecting the optimal weapon among many alternatives is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. This paper develops an evaluation model based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), to help the actors in defence industries for the selection of optimal weapon in a fuzzy environment where the vagueness and subjectivity are handled with linguistic values parameterized by triangular fuzzy numbers. The AHP is used to analyze the structure of the weapon selection problem and to determine weights of the criteria, and fuzzy TOPSIS method is used to obtain final ranking. A real world application is conducted to illustrate the utilization of the model for the weapon selection problem. The application could be interpreted as demonstrating the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed model. (c) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.