Positioning the decoupling point along a supply chain: a case study

Abstract

In today's business world where the supply chains compete with one another, companies need to match their products with different supply chain (SC) strategies in order to increase their market shares, deliver the mass customised products that their customers demand at the right time and adapt to the rapid changes in the market. This paper contributes to the literature by demonstrating how products and supply chain strategies matching can be matched and how the decoupling point can be positioned along a leagile supply chain. To this end, a case study was conducted in a furniture components manufacturing company. First the products of the company were classified and matched with lean, agile or leagile supply chain strategies. With a view to determining the decoupling point of a leagile strategy, fuzzy Dematel method was applied to identify the relationships between the criteria, Dematel-based ANP (DANP) was applied to determine the weight of the criteria, fuzzy TOPSIS was applied to identify the best decoupling point (DP) and 0-1 goal programming (ZOGP) method was applied to identify the optimum alternative solution set under the constraints. This study aims to present a road map for the decision makers by using a case study as an example.