An integrated model of cellular manufacturing and supplier selection considering product quality

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