Hesitant Fuzzy Linguistic Term and TOPSIS to Assess Lean Performance

Abstract

Manufacturing companies usually expect strategic improvements to focus on reducing both waste and variability in processes, whereas markets demand greater flexibility and low product costs. To deal with this issue, lean manufacturing (LM) emerged as a solution; however, it is often challenging to evaluate its true effect on corporate performance. This challenge can be overcome, nonetheless, by treating it as a multi-criteria problem using the Hesitant Fuzzy linguistic and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method. In fact, the hesitant fuzzy linguistic term sets (HFLTS) is vastly employed in decision-making problems. The main contribution of this work is a method to assess the performance of LM applications in the manufacturing industry using the hesitant fuzzy set and TOPSIS to deal with criteria and attitudes from decision makers regarding such LM applications. At the end of the paper, we present a reasonable study to analyze the obtained results.