Title: Positioning the decoupling point along a supply chain: a case study

Authors: Hande Erdogan Aktan; Gokhan Akyuz

Addresses: Department of Management Information Systems, Faculty of Applied Sciences, Akdeniz University, Ye?ilbay?r, Antalya, Turkey ' Department of Business, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Akdeniz University, Campus, Antalya, Turkey

Abstract: In today's business world where the supply chains compete with one another, companies need to match their products with different supply chain (SC) strategies in order to increase their market shares, deliver the mass customised products that their customers demand at the right time and adapt to the rapid changes in the market. This paper contributes to the literature by demonstrating how products and supply chain strategies matching can be matched and how the decoupling point can be positioned along a leagile supply chain. To this end, a case study was conducted in a furniture components manufacturing company. First the products of the company were classified and matched with lean, agile or leagile supply chain strategies. With a view to determining the decoupling point of a leagile strategy, fuzzy Dematel method was applied to identify the relationships between the criteria, Dematel-based ANP (DANP) was applied to determine the weight of the criteria, fuzzy TOPSIS was applied to identify the best decoupling point (DP) and 0-1 goal programming (ZOGP) method was applied to identify the optimum alternative solution set under the constraints. This study aims to present a road map for the decision makers by using a case study as an example.

Keywords: lean; agile; leagile; decoupling point; supply chain strategy; product family; Dematel; fuzzy; Dematel with ANP; DANP; TOPSIS; 0–1 goal programming; ZOGP.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPQM.2017.087302

International Journal of Productivity and Quality Management, 2017 Vol.22 No.3, pp.309 - 339

Received: 01 Oct 2015
Accepted: 22 Aug 2016

Published online: 12 Oct 2017 *

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