A FUZZY SIMULATION MODEL FOR OPTIMIZING PURCHASING TIME IN PROCUREMENT LOGISTICS: CASE STUDY OF A POLYMER COMPANY

摘要

Nowadays the key to survive in business is not only to know well about your product, but is also to know well how to deal with various circumstances by improving the decision making procedures and not just base the hope of company's profitability on huge sales. That's what is happening specifically with petrochemical and polymer companies recently. This paper proposes a fuzzy simulation model regarding to purchasing procedure of a polymer company in Iran, which has previously encountered some problems disturbing one of the most important cost components of any organization, namely: Time! A crisp simulation model is designed in the beginning to help develop the fuzzy simulation model with fuzzy durations between activities. A comparison is performed between crisp and fuzzy results which concluded the improvements made by fuzzifying, mainly in important time factors such as resource utilizations and waiting times. The model can also be well introduced in the skin of an artificial system in order to help improve the purchasing procedures of many other industrial organizations.