A New Spherical Fuzzy LBWA-MULTIMOOSRAL Framework: Application in Evaluation of Leanness of MSMEs in India

The present paper aims to propose a new hybrid multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework with spherical fuzzy numbers (SFNs). We extend two recently developed algorithms such as level-based weight assessment (LBWA) and MULTIMOOSRAL in spherical fuzzy (SF) domain. We present a case study on six MSME units belonging to engineering cluster for examining their leanness. MSMEs form the backbone of the socioeconomic growth and therefore garner attention of the policy makers. Lean manufacturing (LM) has been a key enabler for the last three decades which help the organizations to achieve business growth. We consider the criteria like leadership, supplier focus, customer focus, process management, waste, culture, human resource focus, technology use and communication, and awareness to compare leanness of the MSMEs using expert opinions. We find that committed leadership, waste reduction, and customer value are given more weightage by the experts for achieving leanness in SMEs. Furthermore, the results show that medium and small units with focused product line score high in terms of leanness. We validate the results obtained by our proposed method by comparing with the same derived by using another widely used approach such as Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). We carry out sensitivity analysis for examining the stability in the solution with the changes in the given condition such as variations in the criteria weights. Our results using SF-LBWA-MULTIMOOSRAL show reasonable accuracy and stability.