Facility location selection for the furniture industry of Bangladesh: Comparative AHP and FAHP analysis

Abstract

The furniture industry is growing to a great extent in Bangladesh. Many market researchers believe that the industry has enormous potentiality. However, the expansion of this industry may face complexities within a few years. Due to the wrong selection of facilities, many organizations failed to earn profit as expected. It also needs a large investment. Selecting a suitable place for a new facility is going to be the biggest question of upcoming years. This study aimed to analyze Bangladesh’s furniture industry, address the facility location problem, and provide a constructive solution to the decision-makers. In this study, seven criteria were considered: availability of raw materials, transportations, skilled labor, proximity to customers, energy availability, economic zone facility, and environmental impact, and five ideal locations or alternatives: Khulna, Chattogram, Bogura, Gazipur, and Manikganj. Thirty-four experts took part in the survey to analyze the significant criteria for selecting a furniture industry’s facility location and alternatives or potential locations for the facility. The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Fuzzy AHP methods (FAHP), two MCDM techniques, were used to analyze the data set. A sensitivity analysis was done to determine the model’s robustness for any critical changes in the real world. The result showed that ‘energy availability is the most significant criterion to select a facility location for the furniture industry, where it got 35.1% criteria weight in AHP and 33.9% in FAHP. ‘Chattogram’ was selected as the most suitable place containing 33.74% normalized weight in AHP and 33.81% normalized weight in FAHP.