Assessment of suppliers and optimum order allocation in agile automotive manufacturing companies

This paper develops a systematic approach to assist agile automotive manufacturers to assess their potential suppliers and allocate required orders. Agile manufacturing (AM) and its related concepts have been discussed in previous literature. However, its integration with purchasing and supplier selection is less examined. Therefore, the development process of agile supplier selection framework is the main addressed problem of this research. A comprehensive investigation on previous studies and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) were applied to finalise agile supplier selection criteria. Next, the developed agile supplier selection criteria were applied to assess suppliers using fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP). Finally, a multi-period and multi-objective order allocation model was developed to determine optimum agile purchasing quantity of items from suppliers. Therefore, the main outputs of this research include agile supplier selection criteria, ranking of suppliers and multi-period purchasing quantity from suppliers. In addition, a sensitivity analysis was applied to provide more understandable and practical outputs. Copyright © 2022 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.