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It is a difficult work for many companies to maintain
or gain a competitive edge in the market-place
because of the fast changing environment and customers''
needs. Thus, many firms modify their formal production
system to fit the changing demand by exploiting the
advantages of modern technologies. A decision support
framework is proposed in this study to integrate the strategy
planning into the system evaluation process to make the
selection of modern manufacturing systems more solid. The
decision support framework consists of three phases. A "TOWS"
matrix for strategy planning is suggested, in which ''T'' stands
for threats, ''O'' for opportunities, ''W'' for weaknesses
and for strengths, in the first phase. Once the strategy is
determined, a number of alternatives will be available.
The executive support system ''AHP'' is used to narrow the
usually relatively large group of candidate configurations
down to the three or four ''most attractive'' configurations.The
remaining three or four configurations are analyzed in more
details in the third phase. The analysis in phase three is
quantitative. The packages ''Promodel'' and ''Starcell''are
selected for the analysis in phase 3. An implementation of the
proposed decision support framework to a real shoe-making
enterprise is presented in the last part of the study.
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