Customer and Order Prioritization With Multi-Criteria Decision Making

Abstract

Customer and order prioritization is prioritizing the orders according to features of customers and orders. In make-to-order production systems, especially when demand exceeds the capacity, a need arises for prioritizing the orders. As a customer may have more than one order and as one type of order may belong to different customers, every job order must be prioritized according to both customer and order features. Prioritization values may be used for accepting and scheduling orders or selecting customers as a reflection of supplier selection. In this chapter, the production manager and customer relationship manager of a metal processing firm were interviewed for determining the criteria for prioritizing customers and orders. After determining the criteria, the managers were asked to pairwise compare the criteria for weighting with analytical hierarchy process (AHP). Then by considering scores of customers and orders for each criterion, orders were prioritized with technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS).