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ries, not only new
products need to be developed fast and efficiently, but also the products need to be
customized in a way to achieve competitive advantages. The mainstream of mass
customization (MC) is focused upon flexibility and quick responsiveness through
variety customized goods with low cost and high quality (Pine, 1999; Davis, 1987;
Jiao et al., 2004). In view of the business process within the MC environment,
customers, manufacturers and suppliers play major roles throughout the entire logistic
chain (Coyle et al., 2002; Heizer and Render, 2001; Gattorna and Walters, 1996). As
indicated by Christopher (1998), the scope of logistics spans the organization, from the
management of raw materials to delivery of the final product, is directly related to the
needs of customers. Many attentions have been paid to the customer satisfaction
regarding MC (Frutos et al., 2004; Piller and Muller, 2004). However, the supplier
involvement issue has not been specified as the customer involvement for MC.
The benefits of integrating suppliers into customized manufacturing is well described
in theory, but has not been well implemented in practice (Jiao et al., 2004). Many issues
need to be concerned for the supplier involvement. This paper is particular focused on
the supplier selection, because an appropriate supplier is an important factor for
a manufacture to meet customers’ requirements, which directly affect the way of a
manufacturer to deliver products to a targeted market.
A web-based supplier selection system has been previously developed by the
authors (Hou et al., 2004; Hou and Su, 2006). Different from the traditional supplier
selection method, the system provided a flexible way for manufacturers to find
appropriate suppliers more efficiently when external environment changes. A total of
12 pre-defined initial matrices have been developed based on the survey results with
AHP method, however, there are two major drawbacks to this system, the first is the
supplier selection issue is only concerned within the general condition, and MC has not
been particularly considered; the second is that the interactions among and between
various factors have not been addressed properly for lack of dependence analysis in
AHP. As mentioned before, increasing flexibility and quick responsiveness by
providing sufficient variety of customized goods are the essential characteristics of
MC, and furthermore, the competitive market place and continual pressure on product
improvement push manufacturers to alter their relationship with suppliers. As a result,
it is necessary to modify supplier selection criteria in order to meet the requirements
under the MC environment.
The purpose of this research is to establish a web-enabled, in particular,
Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) and model-view-controller (MVC) oriented system with a
novel supplier selection approach for MC to help manufacturers to identify suitable
suppliers for the components, materials and services required within the process of
product design and manufacture. The state of the art web-based technologies, the
business models and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)/Analytic Network Process
(ANP) decision-making methods are integrated to implement the system.
Literature review
Theoretical basis for the supplier selection method for mass customization
Customization through the st