Applications of Fishbone Diagram and DEMATEL Technique for Improving Warehouse Operation—A Case Study on YMT Overseas Imported Components

A case study on YMT (Yamaha Motor Taiwan Co., Ltd.) overseas imported components was initiated by Yan-zhang Lin who is responsible for efficiently managing warehouse operation to YMT three factories, whose objective was to improve the process efficiency of warehouse operation for supplying overseas imported components. This paper is aimed at describing the improved course of events which include identifying encountered problems in practical works, classifying relative problems of cause-and-effect relationship by Fishbone Diagram, understanding the influential relationships through decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) technique, and improving the warehouse operation of overseas imported components. The results showed that the crucial factor “process” should be first improved on the supply of YMT overseas imported components. In a sense, the company can gain a better performance in the entire warehouse operation because “process” is the most important crucial factor. In addition, the crucial factors of “environment” and “people” can be taken into consideration for enhancing the “process” performances because they can remarkably influence on crucial factor of “process”, and further impact on overall process performance of warehouse operation. The main contribution is a submission of the six critical factors for improving the process performance by using Fishbone Diagram, as well as including an importance and influential relationships among six critical factors through DEMATEL method. Also, a proposed process will be able to be utilized for improving on YMT overseas imported components of warehouse operation in practice. The research limitation is that due to time limitation, this paper has not taken all problems into consideration. Hence, it is necessary to focus on the other critical factors for improving warehouse operation performance in future studies.