A two-phase multi-criteria decision support system for supply chain management

Multi-criteria decision-making techniques have been used to solve a range of real world problems in management science and specific supply chain management (SCM) problems (e.g. supply chain design and reconfiguration, purchasing, scheduling, supplier selection). The results obtained are encouraging. Nevertheless, robust approaches for solving multi-criteria supply chain problems are still in progress, and more research is needed before an effective and operational framework can be developed. The proposed approach introduces a two-phase hierarchical approach to solve a multi-criteria SCM problem integrating both strategic and tactical decisions where the supply chain is evaluated based on the supply chain operations reference model. The latter considers various metrics such as delivery reliability, flexibility, responsiveness and cost. The first phase evaluates different supply chains configurations using analytic hierarchy process. The second phase solves the network for the optimal safety stock placement using dynamic programming. The output from this two-phase process is a supply chain network configuration that has the right amount of safety stocks at the right place to absorb variability in demand.