Customer relationship management and new product development in designing a robust supply chain

Department of industrial engineering, Babol Noshirvani University of Technology, Babol, Iran

^* Corresponding author: paydar@nit.ac.ir, paydar.ie@gmail.com

Received: 8 February 2018
Accepted: 13 November 2018

Abstract

New product development is a basic requirement for any company to survive in the competitive market. Most of the organizations realized that relying solely on the traditional competitive levers, such as increasing the quality, reducing costs, and distinguished provision of goods and services is not enough anymore. In addition to the aforementioned competitive advantages, a company needs to introduce new products and out-phase the old ones at the right time. In this research, the design of a supply chain network considering new product development is investigated. Here, the notion of customer relationship management is incorporated into the proposed mathematical model. Moreover, product demand that is inherently uncertain in the real situations is embedded in the proposed robust model. Objectives of new products development, and customer satisfaction along with maximization of the profit is considered in the model. Moreover, an improved multi-choice goal programming method is implemented to solve the model. Finally, the model performance is evaluated for a real-world case.