Assessment Lean Level in Manufacturing Enterprises Based on Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making (FMCDM) - Literature Review

In the current competitive environment and globalization, every organization is trying continuously to get better to stay competitive with their global rivals. So, most Manufacturing companies pursue to improve their productivity to meet the highly demanding business market by using effectively the resources, eliminating wastes, enhancement of process flow, and continuous improvement. There are many tools and strategies to improve productivity. Therefore, selecting appropriate strategies is an essential problem that faces most companies. Lean Manufacturing (LM) is a powerful system that improves efficiency, productivity, quality and reduces costs in any company. One of the reasons to fail the lean programs implementation is the lack of a clear understanding about what are lean performance and its evaluation. Lean level assessment can be considered a guide for the organization through their lean journey where it is the first step that led to the control and finally to improve the enterprise performances. Nowadays fuzzy Multicriteria Decision Making (FMCDM) can be considered one of the most efficient approaches to assess the lean performance level for any manufacturing enterprise to identify if the enterprise is near or far from the ideal implementation of the lean principles. The contributions of this review paper are; highlighting on Fuzzy Technique of order preferences by similarity to ideal solution( Fuzzy TOPSIS) and Fuzzy Multi criteria Optimization and compromise solution (FuzzyVIKOR) as distance-based methods for assessment the current lean performance for manufacturing enterprises and help them to improve continuously their performance ; review the most common lean assessment methods; highlighting lean dimensions and criteria that can be used in lean assessment by Fuzzy TOPSIS and Fuzzy VIKOR with illustrate the various criteria weighting methods. This review paper can be considered as a guide for researchers who interest in lean performance assessment that will fill some gaps in field of lean assessment level.