Supply chain is a network of organizations that work together and performs various business functions such as procurement of raw materials, converting the raw material into semi-finished or finished goods and distributing the same to their ultimate customers. Presence of bullwhip effect in a supply chain is costly and degrades the performance of the supply chain. Reduction in bullwhip effect can improve the efficiency or profitability of a supply chain. The objective of this paper is to know the impact of imperfect Advance Demand Information (ADI) sharing on bullwhip effect in a four-stage serial supply chain and to evaluate the supply chain performance by conducting an experiment similar to the beer distribution game. The performance measures used are variance of orders placed by each stage, fill rate, total inventory at each stage and total holding cost of the supply chain. Results show that imperfect ADI improves the performance of the supply chain. The performance of the supply chain is also evaluated under order up to level (R, S) policy with safety stock and it is found that the performance of supply chain is better when inventory policy used.

Electricity distribution systems are considered as the most critical sectors in countries because of the essentiality of power supplement security, socioeconomic security, and way of life. According to the central role of electricity distribution systems, risk analysis helps decision maker determine the most serious risk items to allocate the optimal amount of resources and time. Probability-impact (PI) matrix is one of the most popular methods for assessment of the risks involved in the system. However, the traditional PI matrix is criticized for its inability to take into account the inherent uncertainty imposed by real-world systems. On the other hand, fuzzy sets are capable of handling the uncertainty. Thus, in this paper, fuzzy risk assessment model is developed in order to assess risk and management for electricity distribution system asset protection. Finally, a comparison analysis is conducted to show the effectiveness and the capability of the new risk assessment model.

This paper addresses scheduling a set of weighted jobs on a single machine in presence of release date for delivery in batches to customers or to other machines for further processing. The problem is a natural extension of minimizing the sum of weighted flow times by considering the possibility of delivering jobs in batches and introducing batch delivery costs. The classical problem is NP-hard and then the extended version of the problem is NP-hard. The objective function is that of minimizing the sum of weighted flow times and delivery costs. The extended problem arises in a real supply chain network by cooperation between two layers of chain. Structural properties of the problem are investigated and used to devise a branch-and-bound solution scheme. Computational experiments show the efficiency of suggested algorithm for solving instances up to 40 jobs.

One of the most important steps to build an appropriate business unit is to setup a suitable long-term strategy. A good strategy helps organization take better advantage of the existing resources and improve the performance of the firm. This paper presents a hybrid method consists of importance-performance analysis combined with fuzzy analytical hierarchy process to determine different operating strategies to increase the performance of a cement industry in Iran. The results indicate that being competitive is number one priority followed by fast delivery, quality product, dependability, cost of production and flexibility.

Customer service is increasingly being recognized as a source of competitive advantage. The keys to provide effective customer service are determining the customer needs, accurately, and meeting and exceeding the needs in a consistent manner. Companies should adapt a strategic, proactive focus on customer service based on understanding logistic processes and designing the logistics system to meet their needs. This paper proposes an approach based on the quality function deployment (QFD), for ranking strategic actions to improve logistics service. The paper addresses the issue of how to deploy the house of quality (HOQ) to effectively and efficiently improve logistics processes and thus customer satisfaction. For data collection, fuzzy logic is used to deal with the ill-defined nature of the qualitative linguistic judgments required in the proposed HOQ. The methodology has been tested by means of a real case application, which refers to an Iranian company operating in the manufacturing industry.

In response to increasing inflexible customer demands and to improve the competitive advantage, industrial organizations have to adopt strategies to achieve cost reduction, continual quality improvement, increased customer service and on-time delivery performance. Selection of the most suitable plant or facility layout design for an organization is one among the most important strategic issues to fulfill all these above-mentioned objectives. Nowadays, many industrial organizations have come to realize the importance of proper selection of the plant or facility layout design to survive in the global competitive market. Selecting the proper layout design from a given set of candidate alternatives is a difficult task, as many potential qualitative and quantitative criteria need to be considered. This paper proposes a Euclidean distance based approach (WEDBA) as a multiple attribute decision making method to deal with the complex plant or facility layout design problems of the industrial environment. Three examples are included to illustrate the approach.

The way orders are accepted or rejected is the most important factor in customer satisfaction and success of make-to-order systems. The incoming orders to such organizations have certain delivery date in which the customer expects the order to be fulfilled and delivered. In some cases, unexpectedly increased orders exceed the existing capacity for on time fulfillment. In addition to rejection of order, as a typical choice, other options like outsourcing and capacity expansion are available to compensate for capacity shortage and deliver incoming orders according to schedule. However, each of the proposed options is superior in one or more criteria and so selecting the best one is not simply possible. The main goal of this study is to provide managers with a comprehensive, systematic, and applicable approach to evaluate and select the best of the existing options. For this purpose, a model comprised of some multi-criteria techniques is delivered. Our proposed model is a blend of FAHP and FTOPSIS methods. In this model, FAHP is first used to determine the weight of criteria and then Fuzzy-TOPSIS (FTOPSIS) is employed to rank the options. Finally, the proposed model is applied on an actual case to assess and examine its efficiency.

Supply chain coordination as an effective tool plays an important role in improving supply chain performance. In this article, a two-level supply chain with one manufacturer and two retailers is considered. The order quantity that retailers are faced with depends on the amount of advertisements and both retailers compete with each other on advertising. The Stackelberg game is established between manufacturer and retailers such that the manufacturer and the retailers play the leader and the follower roles, respectively. First, the manufacturer determines the wholesale prices for retailers and instead, the retailers determine the order quantity and advertising level, simultaneously. The manufacturer produces one kind of product and delivers it to retailers before the beginning of selling season. Retailers can affect the order quantity regarding the demand dependency on advertising level through the incurred costs from the advertising. In this paper, we show that we can achieve the desirable supply chain coordination through using combined quantity discount and advertising cost sharing contracts. We also consider the win-win situation for all the members of the supply chain.

Quadratic assignment problem (QAP) has been considered as one of the most complicated problems. The problem is NP-Hard and the optimal solutions are not available for large-scale problems. This paper presents a hybrid method using tabu search and simulated annealing technique to solve QAP called TABUSA. Using some well-known problems from QAPLIB generated by Burkard et al. (1997) [Burkard, R. E., Karisch, S. E., & Rendl, F. (1997). QAPLIB–a quadratic assignment problem library. Journal of Global Optimization, 10(4), 391-403.], two methods of TABUSA and TS are both coded on MATLAB and they are compared in terms of relative percentage deviation (RPD) for all instances. The performance of the proposed method is examined against Tabu search and the preliminary results indicate that the hybrid method is capable of solving real-world problems, efficiently.

Evaluation of proper supplier for manufacturing organizations is one of the most challenging problems in real time manufacturing environment due to a wide variety of customer demands. It has become more and more complicated to meet the challenges of international competitiveness and as the decision makers need to assess a wide range of alternative suppliers based on a set of conflicting criteria. Thus, the main objective of supplier selection is to select highly potential supplier through which all the set goals regarding the purchasing and manufacturing activity can be achieved. Because of these reasons, supplier selection has got considerable attention by the academicians and researchers. This paper presents a combined multi-criteria decision making methodology for supplier evaluation for given industrial applications. The proposed methodology is based on a compromise ranking method combined with Grey Interval Numbers considering different cardinal and ordinal criteria and their relative importance. A ‘supplier selection index’ is also proposed to help evaluation and ranking the alternative suppliers. Two examples are illustrated to demonstrate the potentiality and applicability of the proposed method.