A new decision making structure for managing arriving orders in MTO environments

Highlights? Proposing a structure for MTO firms to select an appropriate combination of orders. ? Prioritizing the orders and so, evaluating the orders regarding their priority. ? Calculating rough-cut capacity for each order depends on priority level. ? Improving the Kingsman backward method in computing the ERD and OCD. ? Making final decisions on orders based on their due dates, MAD, ERD and OCD. In order to improve the quality of decision about orders incoming to make to order (MTO) company, an effective evaluation approach is essential. So, in this paper a comprehensive decision making structure is presented for acceptance or rejection of incoming orders. The aim of the proposed structure is to manage the arriving orders so that the MTO system just proceeds to produce those arriving orders which are feasible and profitable for the system. The proposed structure composed of three phases. At the first phase, arriving orders are prioritized into high and low priority orders, considering characteristics of order and customer and utilizing technique for order performance by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). At the second phase, rough-cut capacity was calculated for each order regarding priority level and so, acceptance or rejection decision is taken based on it. Finally, at the third phase, the previous phase accepted orders are evaluated based on their due dates and material arrival times and final decisions for orders are made. At the end, the effectiveness of the proposed structure is demonstrated through a case study.