A Study of a Multi-Criteria Assessment Model for Material Substitution Management and Key Performance Indication

Owing to the trend of mass customization, variation of product structure cannot be fixed or unchangeable. Therefore, substitutive materials policy is a popular used method to meet customers’ demand expectation. However, the management objectives of material substitution are various and sometimes there are conflicts between different departments. Therefore it needs a systematic analysis to find out the key factors of adopting substitutive materials under management goal. In this research, an assessment model based on Analytic Network Process (ANP) was constructed to connect the relationship of management objectives and cause of substitutive materials. Firstly, an expert questionnaire was used to filter out useful performance matrices, used as the sub-criteria of the ANP model. Then, a real case was analyzed using the constructed ANP-based assessment model for material substitution management. Finally, this model was also applied to different companies to verify the effectiveness of generalization through collecting questionnaires from them. The both results indicate that product quality, product reliability and product design are the three significant critical factors that influence the decision of adopting substitutive materials. From the previous three factors, it’s obvious that the product quality is the most influential factor when making material substitution decision which the same as practical experiences. That is, this proposed ANP-based assessment model is robust and effective for material substitution management.