Business Excellence and Management

11-32

Authors: Mahmud Hassan TALUKDAR, Ryo FUJIMORI, Yijia ZHONG, Distinction CHAN

Sustainable urban design is widely considered a promising approach to deal with the multifarious array of social, economic and environmental problems in urban agglomerations. Sustainable design principles and policies helps to improve social inclusion, mobility, accessibility and various urban problems and thus enhances the overall quality of life in cities. But what will be the appropriate policies for sustainable urban designs are yet to be addressed. If, policies are identified than worldwide researchers, urban planners, urban designers and policy makers can easily use them for making urban area sustainable. So, the aim of this paper is to explore the sustainable urban design policies. To cite an example of how cities can use the explored policies, relevant lessons for Hong Kong is briefly described. Literature review and case study are the main source of information of this study. This paper is divided into three chapters; in its first chapter emergence and definition of sustainable development and sustainable urban design is described, in its second chapter policies for sustainable urban design explored and in the third chapter relevant lessons for Hong Kong are narrated.

43-52

Authors: Shpend IMERI

This study aims to explore the current status and future patterns of Logistics Information Systems [LIS] of organizations in Macedonia. Basically the aim and objectives of this research are threefold: 1) To identify the major challenges and developments of Logistics Information Systems by firms’ in Macedonia, 2) To assess the current state and future policies of LIS 3) To clarify the need of LIS efficiency and effectiveness to organizations strategies. Grounded methodology is adopted in order to analyze the data collected as well as other sources of information. However, the questionnaire used in this research was adopted from the study developed by Ketikidis et al. (2008) but again changes were incorporated. The data collected from 65 companies are analyzed by the employment of descriptive statistics by utilizing ‘Statistical Package for Social Sciences’ (SPSS) software in order to test the collected data. The findings, nevertheless recommend that organizations face common challenges in general, majority of the respondents state that they are emphasizing more into closer partnership with suppliers and Just In Time (JIT) supply rather than concentrating on customer service. Thus, findings suggest that firms in Macedonia are not ready yet to play an important role in the South-East European supply chains or in global supply chains. The present obstacles that embrace the abilities of developing relationships with the forward links, weak organizational strategic planning and low level of infrastructure as well as low level of Logistics and Supply Chains Management education are the main drawbacks for this country. Indeed changing managerial mentalities within these companies is gradually progressing and in the future it is expected for better Logistics and Supply Chain knowledge.

63-76

Authors: Ghada Ali TIMRAZ, Faris Nasif AL-SHUBIRI

This study aims to examine the impact of stock options trading on the market value of companies listed in Kuwait Stock Exchange. The phenomenon of volatility in securities prices concerned as a threat to the companies listed on Kuwait Stock Exchange, which forced companies' managers to deal with new financial instruments particularly financial options to hedge from those risks .we will take a sample of (30) companies that deal with stock options, these companies are listed in the appendices, we have chosen these companies because of the availability of adequate information about trading on stock options from 2006 to 2011. All companies must adopt options contracts because of its significant impact on the market value of those companies through the impact on the trading volume of companies' stocks and thus changes in the demand and supply of such shares which leads ultimately to changes in the value of shares of these companies in the market. The researcher recommends using options contracts from the perspective of the investor because of its role in achieving high and guaranteed profits, when exercising the option contract whether is call or put option at a predetermined price and thereby yielding a capital gains resulting from the difference between buying and the selling price.