In the era of digital manufacturing and highly competitive environment, it is desirable to deliver the right item, right quantity at right time at minimal cost. Under this volatile market environment, the inventory should be readily available at the manufacturing level at the lowest possible cost. Many industries have been conventionally employing traditional ABC analyses based on a single criterion of annual consumption cost for classification of inventory items in spite of other criteria such as unit cost, consumption rate, average inventory cost that may be important in inventory classification. To address such problems, incorporation of Multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods is considered an advantage. The present article focuses on a new approach to categorize inventory items using Modified similarity-based method. The proposed method is applied to the inventory data of raw materials from a renowned conveyor belt manufacturing company of West Bengal, India. By using Modified similarity-based method, the items are classified in A, B and C categories. Results obtained from the said method using R program are compared with those of well recognized TOPSIS and AHP methodologies to validate the application of this method for inventory classification.

To acquire the competitive advantages in order to survive in the global business scenario, modern companies are now facing the problems of selecting key supply chain strategies. Strategy selection becomes difficult as the number of alternatives and conflicting criteria increases. Multi criteria decision making (MCDM) methodologies help the supply chain managers take a lead in a complex industrial set-up. The present investigation applies fuzzy MCDM technique entailing multi-objective optimization on the basis of ratio analysis (MOORA) in selection of alternatives in a supply chain. The MOORA method is utilized to three suitable numerical examples for the selection of supply chain strategies (warehouse location selection and vendor/supplier selection). The results obtained by using current approach almost match with those of previous research works published in various open journals. The empirical study has demonstrated the simplicity and applicability of this method as a strategic decision making tool in a supply chain.

There are many opportunities and challenges in the area of Indian technical education due to liberalization and globalization of economy. One of these challenges is how to assess the performance of technical institutions based on multiple criteria. The purpose of this paper is to describe and illustrate an application of a structured approach to determine relative performance and ranking of seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) under multi-criteria environment. To evaluate the alternatives in respect to stakeholders’ preference we suggest a new methodology consisting of fuzzy AHP, DEA and TOPSIS. Fuzzy AHP technique is used to determine the weights of criteria and some linguistic terms are applied to assess performance under each criterion, then in order to determine the value of linguistic terms we use the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method. Finally TOPSIS method is used to aggregate performance scores under different criteria into an overall performance score for each institution and ranking the institution according to their overall performance score. The proposed fuzzy AHP–DEA–TOPSIS methodology is applicable to any multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problem due to its generic nature.

This paper addresses the application of group Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), for assisting decision makers by evaluating, ranking and selecting material handling equipment (MHE). The present study considers engineering economy as one of the erudite tool for performance evaluation of said equipment in the integrated and synergetic way. Lastly, incremental analysis is used for final ranking of the equipment under inquisition.