| With the market environment changing dynamically and rapidly, the agility of the business model becomes a survival factor not just a competitive advantage for the success of an enterprise. Agility of a business model means the ability of frequent remodeling with reduced risks and setup-time. In addition, the need of an agile supply chain has been dramatically increased for all kinds of enterprises due to dynamic and unstable market environments.; Traditionally, structured or procedure-oriented (PO) modeling methodologies and mathematical optimization modeling approaches have been widely used to design a supply chain, but they have potential limitations to satisfy dynamic demands due to the static properties inherently they have. From this point of view, an object-oriented modeling approach could be a better way to meet these requirements.; In this dissertation, a heuristic methodology to design and manage an agile supply chain business model is proposed using object-oriented (OO) modeling approach and analytic hierarchy process (AHP). For the OO designing, UML (Unified Modeling Language), the standardized OO notation by Object Management Group (OMG), is adopted to illustrate the methodology and AHP is utilized for managing the model to efficiently respond to the external changes. The cooperation of OO modeling approach and AHP technique gives the model a synergetic effect for agility. Second, a new application of Group Technology (GT) to the OO model beyond the traditional shop floor level machine-part clustering is introduced. This work is to overcome the potential weakness of traditional methods for identifying classes in the OO modeling field. Third, the knowledge of business rule is included in the methodology to make the model more agile and robust. This work is triggered by the need for work on the integration of business rules with object-oriented paradigm. For this purpose, a procedure for identifying and expressing business rules in the OO model is proposed. Fourth, this dissertation suggests an application outline for adapting this methodology to the entire supply chain based on 'Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR)' model. Finally, the empirical comparing the agility of OO approach to traditional (i.e. structured or procedure-oriented) approach under the implementing and maintaining the model stage is presented. Some statistical tests and software engineering measures are utilized to validate this comparison results. The results of this study show that OO approach to implement and maintain the supply chain business model has advantages over the traditional approach. |
