Industry lacks a formal framework for decision making that incorporates multiple decisions affecting various levels of the company that allows companies to be more profitable. This problem is addressed by building a basic framework that integrates pricing, manufacturing system design, technology selection, and manufacturing plant location. The framework was used with synthetic data to test its validity.
Manufacturing system design was based on cellular manufacturing. Manufacturing cells and product families are created by using the clustering program CLUST developed by Vega (1999). The results of the clustering are then used to simulate the manufacturing systems in order to evaluate various performance measures.
The results show the framework is capable of finding the profits of several scenarios using multiple decision factors. So the framework developed here can be used by companies to help them make decisions in finding the most profitable location, technology, price, and system design combination.