Facility Location Selection Using the UTA Method

In response to increasing inflexible customer demands and to maintain/ improve the competitive advantage, manufacturing organizations must adopt strategies to achieve cost reduction, continual quality improvement, increased customer service and on-time delivery performance. Selection of the most suitable facility location for a new organization or expansion of an existing facility is one among the most important strategic issues to fulfill all these above-mentioned objectives. Nowadays, many manufacturing organizations have come to realize the importance of proper selection of the facility locations to survive in the global competitive market. The huge cost associated with acquiring the land and facility construction makes the facility location a longterm investment decision. The best location is that which results in higher economic benefits through increased productivity and good distribution network. Selecting the proper facility location from a given set of candidate alternatives is a difficult task, as many potential qualitative and quantitative criteria need to be considered. This paper attempts to solve two real-time facility location selection problems using the UTility Additive (UTA) method, which is an effective Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) tool often used to deal with complex problems in the manufacturing environment