Identifying and Prioritizing Supply Chain Issues in Iran's Wood and Paper Industries and Providing Improvement Alternatives Using the QFD Approach and Multi-criteria Decision Making

The wood and paper industry is one of the oldest industries with a high level of income generation and employment. The supply chain of this industry includes the exploitation of natural resources and wood cultivation to industrial factories for the production of wooden boards and workshops for the production of wood and paper products. This chain in Iran is involved in challenges that have reduced the productivity of this industry. This research introduces an integrated approachbased on the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) techniques to identify the most important issues in supply chain of Iran's wood and paper industries and to provide proper improvement solutions. In this way, 45 problems were identified in the field of wood and paper industry by reviewing the literature. The issues identified by the TOPSIS method were ranked according to 4 criteria of the level of influence on production, price, sales and quality. In this stage, 23 problems were selected to enter the House of Quality (HoQ) matrix, and 12 solutions were presented to solve and improve them. The final weight of problems and solutions and the correlation between solutions were identified according to the HoQ matrix. The results show that the most important issues facing the wood industry are the lack of proper and accurate production statistics, many problems and cumbersome rules in the process of receiving bank facilities, the lack of supervision by government departments on the wood market, and the low awareness of producers about the wood market. Also, the most important solutions for improvement are planting early trees, providing raw materials for wood structure, creating settlements and industrial clusters related to wood products, allocating government resources to the market, monitoring more government agencies on wood products, and creating the necessary standards on the market. It is noteworthy that for the implementation of the solutions, attention must be paid to the correlation between the solutions so that the effect of synergy is created in the implementation of the solutions.