Dynamic strategic planning and justification systems for advanced manufacturing technology acquisition

Superior manufacturing capability, as the culmination of continued technological development and organizational learning, is the basis for competitive positioning. Technology acquisition is one of many tools to improve capabilities as an integrated and systematic strategic plan and justification problem. Today's greater environmental change challenges not only the accuracy and objectivity of information for decision making but also the flexibility of conventional strategy making process. To address the problem, a framework of dynamic Advanced Manufacturing Technology planning and justification is presented in this paper. The framework enables the system to communicate and interact with the outside environment, designs strategic planning to quickly respond to the impact of environmental change, and evaluates performance outcome in order to guide the future strategy direction through performance feedback.; Environmental scanning sub-model, as an effective information screening program is developed. Fuzzy set membership functions are developed for quantifying measures for scanning system. This thesis establishes the strategic objectives of maximizing flexibility within cost, quality and time constraints. The fuzzy Delphi Method is modified in this thesis to determine the flexibility target level and the three constraints. To quantify human kind's subjective decision making process, degree of achievement for flexibility target and satisfaction degree for the three constraints are represented with fuzzy membership functions. An objective function model of maximizing degree of achievement within the constraints of maximizing satisfaction degree is developed. These objective functions are converted into finding a maximizing decision by intersection of fuzzy goals and constraints using Bellman-Zadeh approach.