Strategic raw material and supplier selection in paint industry with integrated multi-criteria decision making approach

Raw material and supplier selection are critical decision problems especially for manufacturing companies. The right decision of the enterprises for this problem will enable them to produce quality products at acceptable costs without any disruption in production. In this study, raw material and supplier selection problems for an exterior paint developed by a paint company in Eskişehir were solved by Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methods.In order to select the titanium dioxide pigment and kaolin filler raw material that are used in the paint, related brands were determined by the company. In addition, the criteria and the orientation of these criteria were determined by the experts. After the data of the criteria were obtained, the criteria weights were calculated by using CRITIC (Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation) method. Among the MCDM methods, TOPSIS (Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution), EDAS (Evaluation based on Distance from Average Solution) and COPRAS (COmplex PRoportional ASsessment) methods were used to select the most suitable raw materials. During the supplier selection phase, the criteria affecting the supplier selection were determined, and the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method was used to evaluate the suppliers. The validity of the results has been confirmed by the decision makers. Keywords: Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), COPRAS (COmplex PRoportional ASsessment), CRITIC (Criteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation), EDAS (Evaluation based on Distance from Average Solution), Methods, Supplier Selection, Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM), TOPSIS (Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution)