Proposing a Method to Develop Lean Thinking Among Suppliers

According to previous studies, lean production needs lean suppliers and consequently monitoring suppliers’ performance. These studies specifically and purely concentrate on the lean techniques or buyer-supplier relationship, however, we can consider both sides considering a mixed insight. The main idea of this research is to make suppliers lean through a more comprehensive method using Dematel and ANP. A real-world case study is provided, selecting 31 employees in supply department in a steel constructor operating in fields of power, oil and gas under an international holding company, which benefits from a make to order manufacturing system. The main outcomes are: A method to automatically select Strategies Influencing Suppliers’ Performance (SISP); Proposing action plans under each strategy to make suppliers lean considering previous studies on action plans; Selecting clusters of techniques in ANP network to make suppliers lean, based on the case in real world; Selecting SISP based on buyer and supplier opinion simultaneously. The result in this case shows that suppliers should consider financial management and cooperation strategies as prior SISP in ANP decision network, which have related action plans in supplier relationship management. Albeit previous investigations proved advantages of close interactions in buyer-supplier relationship, there are limited studies on a systematic approach to develop lean thinking in mutual relationships. An analysis of selecting lean techniques while ranking SISP and subsequently considering effect of lean techniques on selecting SISP and level of each relation between lean techniques has been presented.