An artificial neural network and fuzzy inference based decision support system approach for customer orientated systems

Changeable business environment forces enterprises consistently either to find out new technologies or to adopt their current strategies to these new conditions. Today the distinctive character among the enterprises is the knowledge flow factor. Hence, an enterprise?s success depends on the ability of creating value from the knowledge processing and the business model to gain this value. Today, supply chain management extends the concept of functional and operational integration beyond an enterprise to all the enterprises in the supply chain. Therefore the individual entities in a supply chain need each other in order to improve the competitiveness of the chain. Herein, customer orientation has recently emerged in supply chain literature as a new strategy depending on the changing competitive environment.This study proposes a model that integrates the customer demands to the supplier capacities regarding the flexible lead times and constitutes a strong decision support structure to increase the business performance for all entities in the supply chain. In this study, supply chain is investigated as three levels; (i) customer-retailer level, (ii) distribution center level, (iii) manufacturer level. Artificial neural network and fuzzy logic based model is applied to a company which is active in durable consumer goods industry in Istanbul. For every level, neural network structures have been established and various simulation experiments have been implemented.After whole evaluation, it is reasoned that the integration of supply and demand chains can be modeled via artificial intelligence techniques. The proposed model ensures flexibility for users in decision making process by containing qualitative and quantitative variables. The results are presented as comparative analysis with traditional statistical methods. The obtained satisfactory results support the applicability of the proposed model for practical usage.