Supply Chain Agility Assessment Module in Fuzzy Paradigm

Abstract

Nowadays, in turbulent and violate global marketplaces, agility has been viewed as a fundamental key strategic consideration of a supply chain needed for survival. To achieve the competitive edge, industries must align with suppliers as well as their customers to streamline operations. Consequently, Agile Supply Chain (ASC) is considered as a dominant competitive advantage. However, so far a little effort has been made for designing, operating and evaluating agile supply chain in recent years. To this end, the present work attempts to develop a procedural hierarchy towards estimating an overall performance metric for an agile supply chain; in an Indian perspective. The theories behind generalized Interval-Valued Fuzzy Numbers (IVFNs) have been utilized in this appraisement cum decision-modeling. Apart from estimating supply chains’ overall agility extent, the study has been extended towards identifying ill-performing areas (called agile barriers) which require future improvement. The concept of ‘degree of similarity’ between two fuzzy numbers has been explored to rank various agile criterions in accordance with their performance extent.