Strategy mishap in the TQM journey – a system dynamics approach

Flexible Manufacturing Cell (FMC) has been adopted as means to curb cycle time, increase productivity and improve product quality. One of the most crucial decisions that severely affect the design of FMC is selection of machines. In resolving the machine selection issues, a decision‐maker has to consider number of attributes such as type of machines, its costs, size of floor surface area, productivity etc. This article aims to develop a fuzzy based MADM approach to assist a decision maker in solving machine selection problem for a given FMC in a most pragmatic way. Adoption of an appropriate rating methodology empowers the decision‐maker to assign different importance to the various attributes. The proposed approach is exemplified by a case study reported in literature.