Fuzzy Expert System for Evaluation of Leanness Achievement Degree (LAD) in Supply Chains

In today's world of global markets and stiff competition in every product, it becomes imperative for companies to explore ways to improve their productivity in terms of implementing flexible and standardized technology, and adopting proven management principles. Lean production is one of the initiatives that many major businesses all around the world have been trying to adopt to remain competitive in the increasingly global market. The adoption of lean principles leads to a positive outcome with stable and/or increasing profitability. This study presents a framework, based upon Expert System (ES), to evaluate the Leanness Achievement Degree (LAD) of companies/ organizations. The proposed ES evaluates LAD of four company branches ,producing dairy products, by five criteria including fuzzy evaluation results, human resource training and involvement, supplier information sharing, continuous improvement, and customer relationship management. By benchmarking the branch that obtained the highest LAD and taking into consideration its top scores for the five mentioned criteria in the proposed ES, other company branches can improve their lean achievement.