Evaluation of Lean Manufacturing Systems Using MADM and Fuzzy TOPSIS

Abstract

Lean manufacturing is a management philosophy derived from Toyota Production System (TPS) which aims to increase the overall values of the product or service provided to the customer through elimination of non-value added activities. In the era of globalisation, to remain competitive in the global market, many medium and small sized Indian industries adopt lean manufacturing. This paper focuses on implementation of lean manufacturing in Indian MSMEs. To examine the implementation, attributes which influence lean manufacturing are obtained and industries’ performances on these criteria are rated. In this paper, the methodology selected from many of the multi criteria models is the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). In the actual real world situation, because of the unreliable nature of the information gathered, the attributes are often not absolute and are imprecise. These data can be considered as fuzzy and the aim of this paper is to adopt TOPSIS decision making method to problems with fuzzy data. The rating and weights of each data are expressed as triangular fuzzy numbers. These attributes are then normalized and the TOPSIS methodology is carried out to determine the effect of implementing lean manufacturing technique in an industry. The best industry is identified by fuzzy TOPSIS on the basis of performance towards the considered attributes is consistent with results identified by TOPSIS.