Abstract
In facing the growth of customer orders, a company usually need to face the problem that it cannot accept all the orders because of the lack of capacity. In order to avoid the lost orders and profit, some solutions may be to expanse the capacity, to work overtime, to outsource and so on. The other situation is that the market demand is less than the supply capacity, and so some capacity or employees are idled. Under this situation, the arbitrary lay-off of employees may result in bigger problems such as affecting the daily operations, corporate goodwill and image and so on. Based on the above reasons, a company has to consider a lot of complicated factors and relationships in conducting order acceptance. Therefore, it is desirable to develop an order acceptance decision-support model to evaluate the overall factors in conducting the order acceptance task. This research has combined the strategy map and the data envelopment analysis method to construct an order acceptance decision-support model. First we analyze the overall corporation strategy and the core processes with the strategy map to construct performance indices, than certain weight is assigned for each performance index based on its practical meaning of management. The next step is to develop possible order acceptance policies (i.e. the decision making units, DMUs) according to the demand forecast, and than evaluate the overall efficiency for each DMU with the data envelopment analysis method to find the DMU which has the best overall efficiency. Finally, by performing sensitivity analysis, a company can find out the allowable variation range of each DMU and its performance evaluation index. A case study of a cell phone component manufacturer is conducted to verify the feasibility of the proposed methodology. The results show that it can be used to find the most desirable order acceptance policy.