Abstract
The notebook industry in Taiwan usually provides adequate flexibility to satisfy different customer requirements, so a company has to stock a lot of components. But due to rapid change of product and component design, one has to control the inventory cost carefully to maintain competition. Since the inventory control problem is much complex in the e-commerce era, a company needs to apply the information technology to implement an inventory decision support system. The purpose of this study is to construct an inventory decision support system for the notebook industry in Taiwan. The system is built by using the business process analysis method and the mathematical modeling tools. A computer program is written to implement the system. In this research, a top-down framework is constructed with three sequential phases: (1)Make operational decision for the company; (2)Define the inventory management process and (3)Construct the decision making process for inventory management. The core of the inventory decision support system is the use of the fuzzy sets theory to treat the insufficient data and the application of the category management method to classify different materials and products for the selection of different inventory models. A defuzzification method is used to facilitate the decision-making. Based on a case study, the proposed method performs better than the existing heuristic method for inventory control.