Supply chain leagility using an integrated AHP-Fuzzy-QFD approach

Nowadays supply chain management has become one of the powerful business concepts for organizations to gain a competitive advantage in global market. This is the reason that now competition between the firms has been replaced by competitiveness among the supply chains. Moreover, the popular literature dealing with supply chain is replete with discussions of leanness and agility. Agile manufacturing is adopted where demand is volatile while lean manufacturing is used in stable demands. However, in some situations it is advisable to utilize a different paradigm, called leagility, to enable a total supply chain strategy. Although, various generic hybrids have been defined to clarify means of satisfying the conflicting requirements of low cost and fast response, little research is available to provide approaches to enhance supply chain leagility. By linking Leagile Attributes and Leagile Enablers (LAs and LEs), this paper, based upon Quality Function Deployment (QFD), strives to identify viable LEs to achieve a defined set of LAs. Due to its wide applicability, AHP is deployed to prioritize LAs. Also, fuzzy logic is used to deal with linguistics judgments expressing relationships and correlations required in QFD. To illustrate the usefulness and ease of application of the approach, the approach was exemplified with the help of a case study in chemical industry.