Manufacturing supply chain design and evaluation

Successful supply chain management calls for robust supply chain design and evaluation tools. Many published papers focused on high level strategic aspects of supply chain design and the results are usually generic guidelines for business executives rather than specific tools for plant managers. In this paper, we present a decision-based methodology for supply chain design that a plant manager can use to select suppliers. The methodology utilizes the techniques of analytic hierarchy process and preemptive goal programming. Supply chain operations reference model level I performance metrics are incorporated into the methodology as the decision criteria. In addition, a set of performance metrics is developed to evaluate the overall supply chain effectiveness, which allows direct comparison of different supply chain designs.