Agile Supply Chain Decision Support System

Abstract

AbstractRecently, many organizations intend to make their supply chains more responsive to the change in demand in terms of volume and variety and hence consider agility one of the most critical evaluation criteria in addition to other well-known criteria such as general management capability, manufacturing capability, and collaboration capability. This paper formulates the supplier evaluation and selection problem as a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem with subjective and fuzzy preferences of decision makers over available evaluation criteria and provides the decision maker with a decision support system that presents the Pareto fronts, a set of best possible high-quality suppliers and optimized business operation levels from such suppliers. In addition, this paper quantifies the importance of agility and its sub-criteria in the process of evaluating and selecting agile suppliers by measuring the magnitude of bullwhip effect as a measurement of the business impact of resulting agile supply chain. The proposed system based on fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) successfully determines the priority weights of multiple criteria and selects the best fitting supplier after taking the vagueness and imprecision of human assessments. More importantly, it presents approximated Pareto fronts of resulting supplier chains as the priority weights of agility criterion and sub-criteria within agility are varied.KeywordsSupplier selectionAgile supply chainPareto fronts, Bullwhip effectFuzzy AHPFuzzy TOPSIS