A comprehensive decision making structure for partitioning of make-to-order, make-to-stock and hybrid products

Manufacturing systems produce their products by making use of three main strategies: make-to-order, make-to-stock and hybrid (combination of MTO and MTS strategies) systems. Hence, several products must be considered and partitioned in terms of many different conflicting criteria, leading to a large set of subjective or ambiguous data. Thus, an effective evaluation approach is essential to improve decision quality. In this paper a comprehensive decision, making structure is proposed to choose the proper strategy for producing the products. It consists of a novel hybrid methodology, which combines analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) for partitioning of products. In this study, the rating of each alternative regarding different criteria (throughout the TOPSIS technique) is described by means of linguistic variables. Furthermore, fuzzy AHP methodology is applied to determine the weights of evaluation criteria. At the end, the effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated through a case study.