The usefulness of Multi-criteria sorting methods: a case study in the automotive sector

A variety of Multi-criteria Decision Aiding methods (MCDA) have been proposed in the literature and their applications are increasingly wide spreading in several sectors. However, the use of such methods is very limited and rarely considered in manufacturing companies. The aim of this paper is to understand how useful MCDA methods are and how they can actually contribute to the performance improvement of manufacturing processes. More in detail, we aim to understand the practical impact of MCDA methods and their shortcomings when applied to classify manufacturing anomalies in automotive companies. In this sense, we compare the use of two sorting MCDA methods, the AHPSort and the ELECTRE TRI method with the procedure adopted by an automotive manufacturing company to sort manufacturing anomalies in one of the biggest plants in the South of Italy. We show that, despite the methods requiring an interactive process and the involvement of the decision maker, the procedure was well accepted by the management of the plant and helped them to reflect on how the classification of the anomalies was conducted.