Augmenting agility in production flow through ANP

Abstract

Today’s market demands the manufacturing industries to be more agile in production to produce large volumes as well as a large variety of products. The companies must be quickly responsive in order to take the competitive lead. Decision making strategies used by the companies dealt with different criteria considering that the criteria are independent of each other, whereas in real time cases, most of the criteria are inter-relational. Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods tend to be useful in making decisions based on preferences, during circumstances of more than one contradictory criterion and thus help in approaching the ideal choice amongst options. Approaching a decision is not only to select a best alternative, but also to rank all the alternatives for resources apportionment or to pool the strengths of criteria to produce a collective significance. Analytic Network Process (ANP) does not necessitate independence among elements, unlike its competitors, making it an effective tool to prioritize criteria and make decisions among the more weighted alternatives. The paper deals with ANP as an MCDM gizmo for prioritizing key criteria for augmenting the production agility levels under four major factors Technology, Workers skills, Manufacturing Strategies and Management decisions. A structured methodology for ANP has been constructed based on Satty’s scale and pairwise comparisons performed using criteria weightages, before estimating and surfacing the sub criteria namely, Flexibility of the production process, Learning capability of workers, waste elimination and type of maintenance applied as the most pertinent factors of agility.