Competitiveness of manufacturing firms: an application of fuzzy weighted average

In order to attain a competitive edge in the world marketplace, manufacturing companies must produce high-quality products at low cost. To achieve this, many companies have noticed that in addition to technology, management also plays a vital role. Following some previous studies, this paper devises a competitiveness index based on automation technology and manufacturing management for manufacturing firms. Since most measures are described subjectively by linguistic terms, a fuzzy set approach is adopted, in that the fuzzy measures from different criteria are weighted by their corresponding importance, which are also represented by fuzzy values. The fuzzy weighted average approach produces results which are more informative. To distinguish the superiority of the competitive power of different firms, a fuzzy ranking method is applied. As an illustration, the competitiveness indexes of 15 machinery firms in Taiwan are calculated and ranked.