Prioritising the performance measures of FMS using multi-criteria decision making approaches

Abstract

The evaluation of the most appropriate performance measures in the manufacturing sector is one of the strategic issues that may affect the flexible manufacturing system (FMS). In this paper, five areas of performance measures, i.e., measures related to finance, measures related to customers, measures related to innovation and knowledge, measures related to internal business and miscellaneous measures with their sub-measures are considered. The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework to proactively manage performance measures. For this purpose, a comparative study of multi criteria decision making approaches, simple additive weighting (SAW) and weighted product method (WPM) are integrated with analytic hierarchy process (AHP) in order to get the best solution. AHP is used to determine the weights of the measures which are used in SAW and WPM approaches, for prioritising the performance measures so that management could take the decision regarding improvement. Here, fuzzy logic is used to change the qualitative measures into the quantitative measures.