Development of a decision support system based on integration of analytic and heuristic methods for determination of product mix

Performance of production and business systems is highly dependent on designing flexibility into production and business systems which is, a key matter for success and survival in today?s market. In this context, businesses have inevitable obligation to deal with business strategies such as product portfolio, production capacities, material utilization, and product mix.Adapting to changes in the product-mix is one aspect of this flexibility. Dynamic changes in demand, supply, and manufacturing strategies force companies to make continuous changes to the product-mix. Making such changes gracefully and effectively can be only accomplished when systems design is based on flexible production and business operations. The issue becomes even more challenging when the frequency of product-mix change increases. Therefore, under such conditions, determining the optimum product-mix and analyzing its implications as an integral part of the design process become essential for achieving robust and flexible production and business systems.In this context, a DSS is developed, which involves TOC (Theory of Constraints) based AHP approach to find optimal product mix and GE/McKinsey nine box matrix to support decision makers on formulation of product portfolio strategies.The HMI of this software is developed using Delphi 7.0 and its database is designed on MSSQL Server 2008 R2 database management system. DSS is justified by two PMP (Product Mix Problem) dataset, one from literature and a real one from industry.