Strategic Evaluation of Flexible Manufacturing Systems in a Home Appliance Company in Iran

Nowadays, most of manufacturing firms are in accordance with continuous changes in the market and the today’s competitive world is competing for meeting demand, increasing quality and decreasing costs. So, it is necessary to select a suitable flexible manufacturing system (FMS) for the most of manufactures. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate FMS in one of the Iranian companies producing home-appliance.
In this paper, we use Multi Attribute Decision Making (MADM) process to select the best type of flexibility from these alternatives such as “volume flexibility”, “product flexibility”, “process flexibility”, “material handling flexibility”, and “without using FMS”. For this purpose, the methods of AHP, SAW, TOPSIS, SMARTER and permutation have been used. Finally, the results are combined through an integrated method. The results indicate that the FMS option with flexibility in handling approach is appropriate for this company. Moreover, the obtained results are in consistency with expectation of company's managers.