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Despite being a low-tech industry, woodwork manufacturing industry that includes furniture and cabinet making, witnessed technological leaps in production technologies due to technical developments in computer numerical control (CNC) machining processes. The managers of this industry have attached high importance to the selection of efficient machines as their decisions directly affect the quality and performance of products produced by the firms. Improper selection process can result in a significant decrease in productivity and flexibility. Therefore, a systematic decision-making procedure is needed to prevent inaccurate investments on machines. The purpose of this paper is to purpose a hesitant fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (HFAHP) based multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) system for CNC router selection in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in woodwork manufacturing.

The study proposes a hierarchical model consisting of 4 main criteria and 11sub-criteria for woodwork manufacturing. Technical, personnel, economic and vendor aspects constitute the main criteria. Because of the hierarchical structure of the model, HFAHP is utilized to define the importance weights of the criteria, and to select the most appropriate CNC alternative for a manufacturing company under focus. In a selection procedure, the judgments of decision makers may have vagueness to specify the importance of criteria affecting the decision process. In the literature, the fuzzy set theory has been utilized to deal with such uncertainties. However, when the ideas of the managers have high potential to fall into contradiction in pairwise comparisons, a novel approach is needed to overcome the obstacles. HFAHP allows the membership degree having a set of possible values. It is specifically useful in compromised decisions where experts cannot agree on a single value and prefer to come up with an interval of linguistic variables.

It is revealed that for SMEs in woodwork manufacturing, the most important criterion in selecting the CNC routers is the technical aspects. It may seem counter intuitive that they do not refrain finding the technical criteria superior to the economic aspects, even though they have limited budgets compared to large-scale firms. This demonstrates that in current competitive environment, SMEs understand the need for high-quality production strategy. The weights of the remaining two criteria (personnel and vendor aspects) are relatively low because they expect that they can easily overcome the problem of adapting the workers by training, and all vendors have quality standard qualifications so they can offer a satisfactory service and supplementary systems.

The ready-to-use model proposed is specialized for SMEs in woodwork manufacturing. However, to make it an easily adaptable model for every company in the woodwork industry regardless of its size, the calculation process of the priority weights is illustrated in detail with a numerical example. Any company can follow the process using their own preferences to end up with a specific model that will perfectly reflect their own specific priorities. For demonstrating the application of the model, a case study is conducted in a woodwork manufacturing SME to select the best CNC router among three alternatives.

The originality and value of the paper is twofold. First, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that proposes a woodworking-specific CNC router selection for SMEs. Second, to handle the high uncertainty in the judgements, and to facilitate consensus among the experts during face to face meetings to develop compromised matrices, a very recently developed method, HFAHP is used.

The literature includes many success and failure stories of the firms adopting total quality management (TQM). As many firms in Turkey try to adopt this philosophy, there is a need to clarify quality concepts and comment on applications. This paper attempts a broad review of the current status of TQM and ISO 9000 in Turkey. It considers the extent to which ISO 9000 and TQM are being successfully implemented. It also presents the reasons for obtaining an ISO 9000 certificate, difficulties faced during the registration process, improvements achieved and disappointments experienced after being certified. The findings of this study are compared with those from other countries.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a self-managed career model, in which protean and boundaryless careers were used.

A hybrid methodology is proposed where Buckley’s fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) method was used for prioritization of these criteria, sub-criteria, and indicators, and fuzzy TOPSIS method was used to select the most appropriate career path for a given individual.

The hybrid model for self-managed career was tested with a real numerical example. Findings were congruent with the example’s current career and future career aspirations.

The model was tested with one numerical example. The model could be applied to individuals from various cultures, age groups and backgrounds to further discuss its validity.

Career decisions are affected from individuals’ values and perceptions. New career orientations like Protean and Boundaryless Career are built upon this fact to include subjectivity. Because of the shortcomings of traditional methods to deal with uncertainty related to subjective evaluations, a FAHP and fuzzy TOPSIS based hybrid multi-attribute decision-support model was utilized to help individuals with their career decisions.

This paper aims to create a fuzzy set perception of some quality characteristics in order to prepare a basis for further evaluation. It cites industries that have good quality characteristics as examples. A large amount of data about company characteristics and various factors pertaining to the implementation of total quality management and ISO 9000 was collected through a survey and its results and implications are discussed. In conclusion this paper provides a guide for companies in Turkey in their quest for quality and prepares a basis for a more general evaluation tool for developing countries.