Open AccessA MULTI-CRITERIA DECISION ANALYSIS APPROACH TO PALLET SELECTION: DEVELOPMENT OF A MATERIAL-OF-CONSTRUCTION EVALUATION MODEL
Author(s) -
Chama Chama,
Kevin G. Harding,
Jean Mulopo,
Paul Chego
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
south african journal of industrial engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.225
H-Index - 16
eISSN - 2224-7890
pISSN - 1012-277X
DOI - 10.7166/32-3-2614
Subject(s) - pallet , analytic hierarchy process , supply chain , relation (database) , process (computing) , hierarchy , baseline (sea) , engineering , computer science , selection (genetic algorithm) , operations research , operations management , business , mechanical engineering , artificial intelligence , data mining , marketing , economics , market economy , oceanography , geology , operating system
Although pallets have traditionally been constructed from wood, there has been a shift towards making them from plastic and other composite materials. Subsequently, the storage and transportation industry has been inundated with questions about ‘the best’ pallet material type in relation to a supply chain. In addition, in a rapidly changing global manufacturing and storage environment, industry players have difficulty justifying the high capital cost of adopting new state-of-the-art pallets. This paper seeks to build a model to identify the best pallet material-of-construction (MOC) as perceived by the end consumer. The approach used for this was based on different stages of building an assistive multi-criteria decision model. This included modelling the decision framework using the analytic hierarchy process and undertaking an independent case study as the baseline for the modelling.