A Decision Support System for Strategic Planning

This chapter presents an innovative approach for assisting entrepreneursin making long term capacity decisions in Advanced Manufacturing Sys-tems (AMSs). AMSs require high investment costs in manufacturingequipments, human resources and technology knowledge. Such highinvestments together with the wideness and the variability of the com-petition scenario contribute to increase the perception of the risk forindustrial entrepreneurs especially in SMEs. This problem could beapproached by providing the entrepreneur with a Decision Support Sys-tem (DSS) able to assist her/him in making long term capacity decisionin AMS. The DSS proposed in this chapter allows the entrepreneur toplan its production strategy starting from company business strategy,market strategy, competition scenario and outsourcing scenario. Start-ing from such information, a Fuzzy Expert Systems allows defining thekind of strategic flexibility the company needs and how the companyshould compose its production mix between internal production andoutsourced one. This strategic information represents the input of aLong Term Capacity Planning Model based on economy of scope mod-els that constitutes the economic and financial hearth of the DSS