برنامه ریزی چندهدفه فازی اعمال شده برای انتخاب تامین کننده TFT-LCD توسط تولیدکنندگان پایین دستی

In today’s highly competitive environment, a good supply chain relationship is essential for a company to survive and to acquire reasonable profit. While a few large companies may be able to vertically integrate from the design stage to the final distribution of the entire supply chain, most companies can only focus on their specialized functions and to cooperate with upstream or downstream companies. Supplier selection, as a result, is very important for maintaining strategic alliances. The objective of this paper is to develop a fuzzy multiple goal programming (FMGP) model to help downstream companies to select thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT-LCD) suppliers for cooperation. Fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) is applied first to analyze the importance of multiple factors by incorporating experts’ opinion, and these factors include cost, yield and number of suppliers. Multi-choice goal programming is used next to consider the limits of various resources and to formulate the constraints. From the experimental design and examination, we can testify that the proposed model not only can consider multi-choice goals, decision-making behavior and limit of resources, it can also allocate the purchase among the selected supplier(s).

The spread of flat panel displays is inescapable in the digital era and will become an important human machine interface in the future. Because of their low weight, slender profile, low power consumption, high resolution, high brightness and low radiance advantages, the use of flat panel displays has been expanding from portable appliances to notebook and desktop monitors and even to large screen digital televisions. The two most important trends in flat panel display technology is larger display size along with higher resolution, and TFT-LCD is able to gain the greatest attention from both suppliers and consumers. Outsourcing has become an important business approach since a competitive advantage may be gained by the cooperation with suppliers to provide products/services more effectively and efficiently (McCarthy & Anagnostou, 2004). Companies in a TFT-LCD supply chain can focus on only one or two steps in the supply chain while outsourcing the rest of steps to other companies. For instance, a TFT-LCD manufacturing company may receive orders from a notebook manufacturing company, which specifies the specification of the panels, and manufacture TFT-LCD modules according to the design. It also needs to find upstream companies to obtain the required equipment, material and components. On the other hand, for a notebook manufacturing company, it also needs to find one or several suitable TFT-LCD manufacturing companies to obtain the required TFT-LCD module for producing notebook computers. In consequence, the selection of the right companies for cooperation is important for maintaining a competitive edge. In addition, how to distribute the amount of purchases to the selected manufacturers is also a problem faced by the purchasing companies. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the TFT-LCD industry. Section 3 reviews some recent researches on supplier selection. FAHP and goal programming are discussed in Section 4. Section 5 proposes a fuzzy MCGP model applied to select TFT-LCD companies for downstream manufacturers. Section 6 presents a case study of a notebook manufacturer in Taiwan to verify the practicality of the model. Some concluding remarks are made in the last section.

Supplier selection and evaluation process is very complicated involving interrelationship among two or more organizations in a supply chain, and the process is multi-objective in nature. The selection of one (or several) TFT-LCD manufacturers for subcontracting is essential for a notebook company and any other company that requires TFT-LCD modules. In this research, an MCGP model is proposed to evaluate the performance of TFT-LCD manufacturers and to allocate the purchase amount to the selected companies, while the number of suppliers that should be selected can be set as preferred. Fuzzy AHP is applied first to obtain the weights of the criteria, and an MCGP approach is used to find the optimal solution of module allocation to suppliers. The proposed model is effective for handling real situations, not only in TFT-LCD industry but also in supplier selection in general.