Comparative Analysis for selection of best methodology in determining the lean enabled supply chain agility: An AHP & fuzzy SWARA-WASPAS based approach

Abstract Almost all the manufacturing organizations today needs such a supply chain network which is efficient as well as responsive to optimize their lead time by quick supply along with cheap cost. This could be done either by the adoption of lean strategy which focuses on efficient supply chain enhancement, or the adoption of agile strategy, the primary objective of which is to enhance responsive supply chain. But as seen in most of the manufacturing organizations, their range of products are meant for different categories of customers which starts from low cost to high cost. As per the market study the positioning of the product highly depends upon the differentiation of the customers which leads to the best strategy as per the leaverage of both lean & agility. So adoption of either of the strategy alone is not the best idea to fulfill their objective, while the adoption of a combination of both strategy partially could fulfil their requirement, the concept is termed as leagile supply chain. In this paper the authors has investigated & identified 28 lean enablers, 11 agile factors which are highly responsible to affect any supply chain specially focusing of automobile sector. Apart from above 9 leagile enablers were also identified in the paper. After that few methodologies among many of the Multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) are adopted to find the ranking as well as some interrelationships among the identified enablers or factors. The innovation in the paper is that the authors has proposed the fuzzy SWARA-WASPAS based approach for determining the role of lean in enabling the supply chain agility. Also in continuation the AHP methodology is applied to find the priority weightage & ranking of leagile enablers.Finally the comparative analysis has been done in the results obtained by both the applied strategies to have a more clear picture for the stakeholders, whether to adopt any of them as per the customized requirement of their supply chain.