Evaluation of Supply Chain Flexibility in Automobile Industry with Fuzzy DEMATEL Approach

In today’s competitive market of globalization, supply chain flexibility (SCF) has emerged as a potential weapon to address various uncertainties and associated risks. Offering sales promotional schemes (SPSs) is one of the obvious and inevitable features in the present competitive commercial environment, affecting demand uncertainty severely. This paper models the SCF of automobile industry under SPS environment. Supply chain professionals from two automobile OEMs are involved in the process of identifying 14 SCF strategies that are relevant to the present study. Personal interviews have been conducted with about 15 field managers from these industries and the causal relationships between these flexibility strategies have been established using a structured Fuzzy DEMATEL questionnaire. Using Fuzzy DEMATEL methodology, the identified strategies are ranked based on their degree of influence and classified into cause/effect groups. Based on the analysis, four strategies, viz. volume flexibility, manufacturing flexibility, supplier collaboration flexibility and supplier flexibility, have been recognized to play a decisive role in firm’s performance. The systematic elucidation of the model offers modest bunch bits of knowledge to practicing field experts to ken the utmost essential approaches influencing the performance of the firm in terms of their impelling strength. This helps them in crucial decision-making during SPS. Also, the present investigation will help in spanning the SCF with sales promotions, an unexplored gap in the earlier studies.