Cost is the essence of any production process for it is one of the requirements for the continuity of activities so as to increase the profitability of the economic unit and to support the competitive situation in the market. Therefore, there should be an overall control to reduce the cost without compromising the product quality; to achieve this, the management should have detailed credible and reliable information about the cost to be measured, collected, understood and to analyze the causes for the spread of deviations and obstacles the management faces, and to search for the factors that trigger the emergence of these deviations and obstacles

Research in consumer science has proven that grocery shopping is a complex and distressing process. Further, the task of generating the grocery lists for the grocery shopping is always undervalued as the effort and time took to create and manage the grocery lists are unseen and unrecognized. Even though grocery lists represent consumers’ purchase intention, research pertaining the grocery lists does not get much attention from researchers; therefore, limited studies about the topic are found in the literature. Hence, this study aims at bridging the gap by designing and developing a mobile app (application) for creating and managing grocery lists using modern smartphones. Smartphones are pervasive and become a necessity for everyone tod

In the present article, we implement the new iterative method proposed by Daftardar-Gejji and Jafari (NIM) [V. Daftardar-Gejji, H. Jafari, An iterative method for solving nonlinear functional equations, J. Math. Anal. Appl. 316 (2006) 753-763] to solve two problems; the first one is the problem of spread of a non-fatal disease in a population which is assumed to have constant size over the period of the epidemic, and the other one is the problem of the prey and predator. The results demonstrate that the method has many merits such as being derivative-free, overcome the difficulty arising in calculating Adomian polynomials to handle the nonlinear terms in Adomian Decomposition Method (ADM), does not require to calculate Lagrange multiplier a

Background: Ceramic veneers represent the treatment of choice in minimally invasive esthetic dentistry; one of the critical factors in their long term success is marginal adaptation. The aim of the present study is to evaluate the marginal gap of ceramic veneers by using two different fabrication techniques and two different designs of preparation. Material and methods: A typodont maxillary central incisor used in the preparation from which metal dies were fabricated, which were in turn used to make forty stone dies. The dies divided into four experimental groups, each group had ten samples: A1: prepared with butt-joint incisal reduction and restored with IPS e.max CAD, A2: prepared with overlapped incisal reduction and restored with IPS e.

Background: In the Thermafil as a root canal obturation, system little is known about the effect that varying rates of insertion have on the adaptability of thermoplasticized GP and the amount of apical extrusion. Materials and methods: thirty simulated root canals were obturated with thermafil obturators and Apexit Plus sealer at three different insertion rates. The obturated canals were sectioned at three different levels, the sealer average film thickness for each section was calculated and the amount of apical extrusion for each canal was conducted. Results: the higher adaptability was seen with the faster insertion rate while the slower insertion rate showed fewer tendencies to cause apical extrusion. Conclusions: the intermediate i

An intelligent software defined network (ISDN) based on an intelligent controller can manage and control the network in a remarkable way. In this article, a methodology is proposed to estimate the packet flow at the sensing plane in the software defined network-Internet of Things based on a partial recurrent spike neural network (PRSNN) congestion controller, to predict the next step ahead of packet flow and thus, reduce the congestion that may occur. That is, the proposed model (spike ISDN-IoT) is enhanced with a congestion controller. This controller works as a proactive controller in the proposed model. In addition, we propose another intelligent clustering controller based on an artificial neural network, which operates as a reactive co