An Integrated Model of Cellular Manufacturing and Supplier Selection Considering Product Quality

Today’s business environment has forced manufacturers to produce high-quality products at low cost in the shortest possible delivery time.To cope with this challenge, manufacturing organizations need to optimize the manufacturing and other functions that are in logicalassociation with each other. Therefore, manufacturing system design and supplier selection process are linked together as two major andinterrelated decisions involved in viability of production firm. As a matter of fact, production and purchasing functions interact in the formof an organization’s overall operation and jointly determine corporate success. In this research, we tried to show the relationship betweendesigning cellular manufacturing system (CMS) and supplier selection process by providing product quality considerations as well as theimprecise nature of some input parameters including parts’ demands and defects rates. A unified fuzzy mixed integer linear programmingmodel is developed to make the interrelated cell formation and supplier selection decisions simultaneously and to obtain the advantages ofthis integrated approach with product quality and reduction of total cost, consequently. Computational results also display the efficiency ofthe proposed mathematical model for simultaneous consideration of cellular manufacturing design and supplier selection as compared towhen these two decisions are separately taken into account

Keywords:

Cellular manufacturing , Supplier selection , Product quality , Integrated model