Fuzzy Evaluation of the Required Agility Level to Be Reached by Manufacturing Organizations

Abstract

Change is one of the major challenges that organizations face with in this competitive area. Organizations deal with changes in different aspects such as customer demand variations, technological innovations and instability of the environment. In order to adapt to this turbulent and volatile market, organizations should attempt to change their priorities, strategic visions and their traditional models. For that reason, in the past few decades, the manufacturing realm has taken a rather new orientation toward a manufacturing paradigm called agility. Agility as the 21stcentury’s paradigm is the organization’s ability to exploit the opportunities brought about by the occurring changes. Numerous researches have taken place in association withthis winner strategy, its evaluation and ways of making organizations agile. However, what has not taken much attention is weather getting to an agile state is vital and inevitable for organizations in the globaleconomic system. In this paper, environmental variables of Baspar Sazeh Company were identified as the agility drivers. Then, employing the fuzzy approach, the importance weights, and performance rate of drivers were aggregated; thereby an agility index was obtained enabling the agility-need-level of manufacturingcompanies to be evaluated.

Keywords

• agility
• fuzzy logic
• performance ratings
• importance weights
• fuzzy agility index