Global & domestic supplier selection for tech-enabled property management and hospitality industry using fuzzy AHP

Supplier selection is an important phenomenon for the success of supply chain management in organizations. To survive within a competitive business environment, supply chain departments should be very careful in the matter of supplier selection. Especially evaluating global suppliers together with domestic suppliers is a very complex and risk prone activity. As companies become highly dependent on their suppliers, the consequences might be more critical in case of a poor decision making. This study investigates the supplier selection process for an emerging sector referred as tech-enabled property management and hospitality industry. The companies operating in this industry provide premium fully-furnished serviced apartments to business travelers and expats with mid to long-term duration of stays, after renting the apartments from landlords, building managements or developers in the real estate industry. The aim of this study is to present appropriate selection criteria and propose an efficient technique in selecting the best global and domestic suppliers for the respective industry. In this regard, it focuses on the identification of the selection criteria and its sub-criteria, determination of the importance weights of these decision variables, calculation of the priority weights to rank the suppliers and finally selecting the best supplier with the highest priority weight among the alternatives using Fuzzy Analytic Hierarch Process (FAHP). The data is collected through a questionnaire applied on the experienced professionals in a company operating in this emerging market.