Order-fulfillment ability analysis in the supply-chain system with fuzzy operation times

Recently, supply-chain management (SCM) has received considerable attention in the business-management literature. Facing the vigorous competitive market pressures and globalization, the supply-chain system must shorten the operation time for each member to quickly respond to the requirements of customers. However, the operation time for each member is often uncertain in a supply-chain system. It is difficult to estimate the operation times exactly. Therefore, this paper makes use of triangular fuzzy numbers (TFNs) to describe these uncertain variables and present an order-fulfillment analysis model of a supply-chain system in an uncertain environment. In this paper, a fuzzy model is proposed by combining fuzzy-set theory with program evaluation and review technique (PERT) to calculate the total cycle time of a supply-chain system. Furthermore, the promised-delivery possibility (PDP) index is defined to indicate the order-fulfillment degree of a supply-chain system, based on the fuzzy completion time (CT) and fuzzy due date. Finally, a numerical simulation is presented at the end of this paper to illustrate the procedures of the proposed model. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.