Multi-criteria based novel strategic sourcing methodologies

Supplier selection is one of the most vital actions of companies in a supply chain. With the recent trend in JIT philosophy, there is an emphasis on strategic sourcing that establishes long-term relationship suppliers. Strategic sourcing decisions not only include the evaluation and selection of the potential strategic suppliers but also deal with developing the long-term strategic partnership with these suppliers, increasing the supplier performance via supplier development programs and providing continuous feedback to them. This research presents two methodologies for strategic sourcing problems. The first methodology helps the decision maker to classify suppliers into different categories, identify the differences in performances across supplier classes and monitor the suppliers? performances. The proposed methodology offers to use a multi-criteria sorting (MCS) procedure to determine supplier classes and reduce the number of suppliers. This research also proposes a new MCS methodology, which is named as PROMSORT. In this dissertation, another focus is placed on developing a fuzzy MCS methodology. Secondly, this dissertation presents an integrated multi-criteria decision making methodology for strategic sourcing. The proposed methodology introduces an interactive fuzzy goal programming model for the order allocation problem. In order to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodologies for the strategic supplier selection and order allocation problem, numerical strategic sourcing problems are presented. The results of the computational experiments indicate that the proposed methodologies are useful tools for firms to select the strategic partners, manage their supplier base and allocate the orders to the most appropriate suppliers.