A fuzzy-based assessment procedure for a clothing factory with waste-prevention consideration

Abstract Production facilities, especially factories, should have long-term aspirations to be environmental responsible through adequate waste prevention and management processes. In this paper, we consider the case study of a clothing factory in China with significant labor-intensive operations. The factory's layout, process design, and materials management are aspects that can address the prevention and elimination of unnecessary transportation, processing waste, waiting time, inefficient work methods, inventory, and overproduction. This paper develops a fuzzy-based assessment procedure to consider waste prevention and management in the clothing industry. Here, the factory is modeled as a production unit using a fuzzy multistate network with labor-intensive operations. Using reliability analysis, we determine the probability of demand satisfaction to indicate whether the factory's waste prevention actions are effective. Further, we also show that the established fuzzy-based assessment procedure can consider both pessimistic and optimistic scenarios. Thus, this procedure is extremely useful to a production manager who seeks a comprehensive status of a clothing factory with a focus on consistent improvement.