The ongoing research in the field of cellular manufacturing systems (CMS) is progressing on diverse fronts such as dynamic CMS, virtual CMS, etc. However, the following fundamental issues - 'how an operations manager in an organisation would make a decision of choosing/selecting CMS, when he/she is confronted with different alternatives?', 'how would the manager make a decision, if the decision factors/criteria/attributes (for the sake of simplicity, it will be called as 'elements') are inter-related?' are not given adequate importance. To address the above-mentioned issues, a hypothetical case study is utilised to demonstrate how the managers' can make such a strategic decision using the analytic network process (ANP), one of the recently developed multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) models that has the capability to model the relationships that exist within and between different categories comprising of various decision elements. The results obtained revealed that CMS is a better alternative under the given case situation. Copyright © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.