An available-to-promise process considering production and transportation uncertainties and multiple performance measures

Abstract

An available-to-promise (ATP) activity is to provide the delivery date promise to customers for their specific orders considering the availability of the ordered product. Promising delivery date via the ATP process is critical to customer satisfaction and to stable operation of a supply chain. In practice, when running the ATP process, decision-makers need to consider multiple performance measures (i.e. total costs, tardiness, etc.) together and a high degree of imprecision around the availability of resources under uncertain supply-chain environments. However, most of the previously developed ATP processes did not consider the supply-chain uncertainty and only pursue the minimisation of total costs. In this paper, we propose a new ATP process based on both fuzzy pair-wise comparison and fuzzy linear programming which enables decision-makers to generate the promised delivery dates against the received orders considering (1) the preferences of the decision-maker on multiple performance measures; (2) the uncertainty of production and transportation in the supply chain. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed process, we tested our process on a real-world case of a Korean electronics company that produces consumer electronics such as LCD TVs and refrigerators.

Keywords:

• available-to-promise
• supply-chain uncertainty
• fuzzy pair-wise comparison
• fuzzy mathematical programming
• supply-chain management

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Editor-in-Chief and the two anonymous referees for their valuable comments.