In response to increasing inflexible customer demands and to maintain/improve the competitive advantage, manufacturing organizations must adopt strategies to achieve cost reduction, continual quality improvement, increased customer service and on-time delivery performance. Selection of the most suitable facility location for a new organization or expansion of an existing facility is one among the most important strategic issues to fulfill all these above-mentioned objectives. Nowadays, many manufacturing organizations have come to realize the importance of proper selection of the facility locations to survive in the global competitive market. The huge cost associated with acquiring the land and facility construction makes the facility location a long-term investment decision. The best location is that which results in higher economic benefits through increased productivity and good distribution network. Selecting the proper facility location from a given set of candidate alternatives is a difficult task, as many potential qualitative and quantitative criteria need to be considered. This paper attempts to solve two real-time facility location selection problems using the UTility Additive (UTA) method, which is an effective Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) tool often used to deal with complex problems in the manufacturing environment.

Facility location selection is a vital element in the decision-making process for a wide range of manufacturing organizations due to high initial investment. The facility location selection is based on many operational, strategic and logistic decisions. It is very difficult to relocate the available facilities once the location is established. The problem of facility location selection arises at the time of setting new manufacturing facility or changes in the existing facility due to changes in production capacities, addition or deletion of product lines or changes in market demands. The better the location, the more is its return on investment with higher profit and productivity. The best facility location decision can result in significant productivity improvement with lower operating costs and higher delivery performance. Selection of the facility locations for the manufacturing organizations largely depends on many criteria, which have either direct or indirect impact on the production operation. Hence, selection of the most appropriate facility location is a complex decision-making task requiring an extensive evaluation of the influencing criteria. Some of these criteria include availability of the raw material sources and proximity of markets, availability of labor and trained manpower, environmental and political climate, government policies and taxes, ancillary industries and other resources of production. Thus, the objective of the facility location decision is to select the location of a facility such that the maximum possible advantages can be achieved while considering multiple conflicting criteria. As the selection procedure involves several alternative facility locations and selection criteria, it is often necessary to compromise among those conflicting criteria. For these reasons, different Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) methods are observed to be quite effective for solving the facility location selection problems. This paper explores the application of the UTility Additive (UTA) method for solving the facility location selection problems while taking into account both the qualitative as well as quantitative criteria. Two real time examples are illustrated to demonstrate and validate the applicability and potentiality of the UTA method. It is observed that the results obtained using this method are almost similar those derived by the past researchers.

Past researchers have already applied different techniques to solve the facility location selection problems. But most of those techniques use complex mathematical formulations, while ignoring qualitative information about the considered criteria. Randhawa and West (1995) proposed a solution approach to facility location selection problems while integrating analytical and MCDM models. Houshyar and White (1997) developed a mathematical model and heuristics approach that would assign `N' machines to `N' equal-sized locations on a given site such that the total adjacency flow between the machines would be maximized. Owen and Daskin (1998) provided an overview of the methodologies that had been developed for solving the facility location selection problems. Chu (2002) presented a fuzzy TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) method-based approach for solving the plant location selection problems.

Operations Management Journal, UTA Method, Manufacturing Organizations, Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Tool, Decision-Making Process, Production Planning, Hybrid Intelligent Algorithm, Analytic Network Process, Normalization Constraints, Linear Interpolation, Location Selection Strategies, Decision-Making Problems.