Flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is an important component of competitive strategy, which could be used for improving organizational performance, productivity, and profitability. The goal of this research is to use DEMATEL approach for finding the intensity of influence of selected criteria. Then, in order to evaluate flexible manufacturing systems, the results of DEMATEL are used in SAW method. A questionnaire was developed and ten professional experts working in various departments of Aluminum Composite Panel Industry are asked to answer its questions. The obtained results reveal that in this case, it is a better choice not to implement and develop FMS.

Root cause failure analysis (RCFA) is a structured process to acknowledge cause and effect relationship of failure or unfavorable events in the organization in order to prevent repetition or reduction of failures. There are various tools for RCFA like interviewing, fault tree analysis (FTA), 5 whys, failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), Pareto analysis and storytelling method with different strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, an integrated process model is developed using Reality Charting, FMEA and DEMATEL to understand and implement RCFA effectively. The proposed process model has eight main steps. The presented model in a case study for the UTD-20 engine is implemented and thus, in addition to the use of supporting research in model development, real data as well as the approval of the UTD-20 analysis team members are assisted to validate the proposed model.

In the present paper, a novel intuitionistic fuzzy Multiple Attribute Decision Making (MADM) is proposed for modelling and solving analytical hierarchy process (AHP) problems with small amount of relationship among various criteria. Assigning a membership degree, fuzzy sets can model some uncertainty to the decision space. Intuitionistic fuzzy sets model the uncertainty more accurately associated with both membership and non-membership degree. Based on advantages of Intuitionistic fuzzy sets, this paper first uses IF-AHP to evaluate the weighting for each criterion and then develops an intuitionistic fuzzy DEMATEL method to establish contextual relationships among those criteria. Finally, an integrated IF-DEMATEL-AHP method is proposed and used for a case study for selecting managers in the automobile industry in Iran.

This paper presents an empirical investigation to find out important factors influencing future research, training and employment in Iranian scientific environment. The proposed model of this paper prepares a questionnaire consists of various questions and distributes it among some experts and analyze them using DEMATEL model. The model divides the 7 factors into two groups of cause and effect. On the cause side, there are four factors including preventing future unemployment crises, detecting future skills, finding future profitable/unprofitable job opportunities and prevention on having open position with no volunteer to work. On the effect factors, there are three factors influencing the future research including detecting the present risk associated with jobs, detecting necessary standards for future works and creating a balance between demand and supply.

Supply chain provides continual turbulence with unpredictable disruptions potential for enterprises with complex network infrastructure. Supply chain in enterprises needs to be resilient and sustain-able to provide effective response, removing vulnerabilities and minimizing the impact of negative disturbances. This review article is based on evaluating the role of supply chain management in automobile sector of India. The overall findings derived from review of refined articles state that, in countries like India, automobile industry needs to have appropriate management commitment for sustainability and resilience of supply chain rather than rules and regulations of government. The review article examined 914 articles related to evaluating supply chain management practices in automobile sector of India. Through the analysis of the collected articles, it is evident that DEMATEL is effective technique for providing inter-relationship in automobile industry in India. Rather than economic influence in automobile sector, managerial activity is a major concern for effective sustainable and resilience practices in automobile industry of India.

The efficient evaluation of technological innovation capabilities of enterprises is an important factor to enhance competitiveness. This paper aims to assess and to rank technological innovation evaluation criteria in order to provide a practical insight of systematic analysis by gathering the qualified experts’ opinions combined with three methods of multi-criteria decision making approach. A framework is proposed and uses a novel hybrid multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) model to address the dependence relationships of criteria with the aid of the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL), analytical network process (ANP) and VIKOR (VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje). The study reports that the interaction between criteria is essential and influences technological innovation capabilities; furthermore, this ranking development of technological innovation capabilities assessment is also one of key management tools for managements of other related high- tech enterprises. Managers can then judge the need to improve and determine which criteria provide the most effective direction towards improvement.

Human resources are believed the primary sources of building advanced technological enterprises in today & apos; s world. Improving productivity in human resources plays essential role on empowering employees. The proposed model of this paper uses a hybrid of Burda and DEMATEL to find important factors for improving manpower productivity. The proposed model of this paper uses DEMATEL technique to find cause and effect factors and propose a linear programming technique to find important factors influencing productivity improvement. The results of our survey indicate that job enrichment, service training and job enlargement and quality of work life and training embedded are among the most important factors improving manpower productivity promotion.

Outsourcing plays an important role on reducing unnecessary activities in any organization and helps focus only on value added activities. Water resource organization in each city is responsible to supply fresh and clean water and dispose switch as efficiently as possible and all citizens normally benefit from these organizations. The proposed model of this paper uses DEMATEL to prioritize 14 different factors influencing on outsourcing activities. The survey was performed from October, 2011 to May, 2012 among employees on work for water resource organization in city of Semnan, Iran. The survey chooses a sample of 92 employees out of 120 people who worked for this organization. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 90%, which is well above the minimum acceptable level. The results of the survey indicate that expediting work process is the most important factor while reducing the cost is considered as the least important factors among 14 different items.

In the current competitive environment, managers do their best to convert organizations under their supervision into competitive and responsive through creating capability of timely delivery of quality products and services. In the other word, they try to create value for their customers, which yield more profitability for stakeholders. In line with this, determining of inter-organizational factors and the relationships among these variables and supply chain performance plays an important role in achieving these objectives. The relationship modeling is a type of multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem, which requires applying experts to determine the relationships. The Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) is an MCDM tool, which not only can convert the relationships among cause and effect criteria into a visual structural framework, but also it can be used as a technique to handle the inner dependences within a set of criteria. This paper proposes an effective solution based on DEMATEL approach to help managers evaluate the relationships between inter-organizational factors and supply chain performance.

Employment of supply chain management could impact the entire functional and practical aspects of industry and services positively and change the manager’s attitude toward the implementation of supply chain management systems from a cost-oriented attitude to an enabling attitude towards better activities with other chain members. Yet still many organizations do not have the required vision within the identification of strategic appropriate measure in implementation, evaluation and usage of proper benchmarks to attain an integrated chain. Constantly supply chain management activity can be introduced as a tied up with strategic level of organization. Hence, it is a necessary with an overall strategic approach to identify the criteria, which enable us to include the whole process level of chain, financial matter of chain activities, visible and invisible properties, human activity and turn all these activities into an integrated approach to resolve supply chain difficulties. In this paper, we present an integrated balanced score card combined with DEMATEL technique to prioritize different alternatives for supply chain implementation.