Research Article
A New Spherical Fuzzy LBWA-MULTIMOOSRAL Framework:
Application in Evaluation of Leanness of MSMEs in India
Sanjib Biswas ,
1
Dragan Pamuˇ car ,
2
Darko Boˇ zani´ c ,
2
and Bikash Halder
1
1
Decision Sciences and Operations Management Area, Calcutta Business School, South 24 Parganas, Bishnupur,
West Bengal 743503, India
2
Military Academy, University of Defence in Belgrade, Belgrade 11000, Serbia
Correspondence should be addressed to Darko Boˇ zani´ c; dbozanic@yahoo.com
Received 18 February 2022; Revised 10 May 2022; Accepted 10 June 2022; Published 8 July 2022
Academic Editor: Ardashir Mohammadzadeh
Copyright © 2022 Sanjib Biswas et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
e present paper aims to propose a new hybrid multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework with spherical fuzzy
numbers (SFNs). We extend two recently developed algorithms such as level-based weight assessment (LBWA) and MULTI-
MOOSRAL in spherical fuzzy (SF) domain. We present a case study on six MSME units belonging to engineering cluster for
examining their leanness. MSMEs form the backbone of the socioeconomic growth and therefore garner attention of the policy
makers. Lean manufacturing (LM) has been a key enabler for the last three decades which help the organizations to achieve
business growth. We consider the criteria like leadership, supplier focus, customer focus, process management, waste, culture,
human resource focus, technology use and communication, and awareness to compare leanness of the MSMEs using expert
opinions. We find that committed leadership, waste reduction, and customer value are given more weightage by the experts for
achieving leanness in SMEs. Furthermore, the results show that medium and small units with focused product line score high in
terms of leanness. We validate the results obtained by our proposed method by comparing with the same derived by using another
widely used approach such as Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). We carry out sensitivity
analysis for examining the stability in the solution with the changes in the given condition such as variations in the criteria weights.
Our results using SF-LBWA-MULTIMOOSRAL show reasonable accuracy and stability.
1. Introduction
e last two decades are characterized by revolutionary
progress in technology, extreme volatility and disruption,
cut-throat competition, rise in knowledgeable customer
base, and rapid speed of innovation. e organizations are
challenged by increasing demand from the market in terms
of superior quality, variety, quick response, convenience,
and affordability with respect to cost [1]. As a result, the
organizations have no other choice but to optimize their
processes and put all efforts to deliver maximum possible
value with optimum utilization of resources [2]. In other
words, organizations strive to become lean. e concept of
lean management and/or lean manufacturing (LM) was
first defined by Krafcik [3] and later got popularized in
1990 with explanations given by Womack and his col-
leagues [4]. Gupta et al. [5] defined LM as “an integrated
multi-dimensional approach encompassing a wide variety
of management practices based on the philosophy of
eliminating waste through continuous improvement.” e
work in [6–8] portrays the benefits of practicing the
principles and tools of LM as reduction in defect rates and
waste, human efforts, process hours, space requirement,
and operational cost while increasing value, customer
satisfaction, demand, flow of the process, and morale of the
employees among others. LM paves the way to global
excellence through continuous introspection and im-
provement for the organizations by imbibing the philos-
ophy and implementing the concepts and tools [9]. In this
regard, leanness is the extent to which the concepts and
practices of LM are adapted and implemented vis-` a-vis
organizational goals and customers’ requirement. In simple
term, leanness indicates how lean is an organization [10].
In India as per the provisions of Micro, Small, and
Medium Enterprises Development (MSMED) Act, 2006, the
micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) are
Hindawi
Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2022, Article ID 5480848, 17 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/5480848