Measurement the Competitiveness of Supply Chains with Fuzzy Approach

The main purpose of supply chain management is to achieve customer satisfaction (competitiveness escalation). Therefore, every leading corporation of supply chains has to be able to discover its competitiveness situation (serving) by some models or techniques, and step forward in order to reach maximum customer satisfaction(maximizing competitiveness). At the time being, responding to the question "how the competitiveness (serving) of supply chains can be measured" is of great importance. The importance is due to the fact that by measuring the competitiveness of supply chains, while determining the current performance (weak points and strong points), it is possible to decide on the competitiveness situation (opportunities, and threats) of supply chains in comparison to each other, and this is an introduction to determining the performance ideals and the outset of improvement process. In this article, a new technique called competitiveness (serving) measurement technique of supply chains will be introduced. This technique is designed based on the guidelines and attributes of the supply chain operations reference model. The six steps of this technique are: identifying the effective attributes on the competitiveness of supply chains with the use of fuzzy screening technique, determining the relative importance (weight) of selected attributes in the first step with the use of fuzzy hierarchical analysis, determining the fuzzy quantity of each selected attribute in the first step in the supply chain of the industry under discussion, grading the supply chains under discussion with the use of fuzzy TOPSIS technique, confirming the fuzzy quantities in the from of four major components of competitiveness, and depicting the quantity of competitiveness of each supply chain on the four-dimensional graph.