Quantifying and exhibiting the congruence of process choice criteria with traditional and additive manufacturing systems

A well-determined manufacturing system helps organisations achieve a desired competitive advantage. So, the manufacturing system selection concerns the critical decision of manufacturing strategy deployment. In the present era of industry 4.0, there exist four traditional manufacturing systems (TMS) (i.e. job-shop, batch-shop, mass, and continuous) and additive manufacturing system (AMS). Different process choice criteria (PCC) are responsible for selecting the best-suited system from five or a hybrid (AMS + TMS) configuration. This research formulates a two-stage framework comprising Delphi and Voting analytical hierarchy process (VAHP) techniques for quantifying the congruence between PCC and manufacturing systems. Initially, extant literature is reviewed to identify the critical PCC and further validated by industry experts through Delphi. This results in retaining thirty-six PCC. The relative importance of an individual criterion concerning a particular manufacturing system is computed using VAHP in the second stage to understand the alignment of PCC in different manufacturing systems for exhibiting the congruence between PCC and manufacturing system (TPS and AMS). The findings offer critical insights about the different PCC and their level-of-fit in TMS and AMS, which can assist researchers and practitioners in evaluating a suitable manufacturing system for an organisation using identified PCC.