An intelligent supplier management tool for benchmarking suppliers in outsource manufacturing

A global corporation's supply chain usually consists of enterprises and manufacturers that are graphically dispersed around the world, whereby each company is involved in a wide variety of supply chain activities such as order fulfillment, international procurement, acquisition of information technology, manufacturing, and customer service. However, selecting suppliers based on accumulated experience is not both effective and scientific due to subjective judgment and lack of systematic analysis. Therefore, continuously tracking and benchmarking performance of suppliers and forming an appropriate supplier selection mechanism is one of the crucial activities in supply chain management. This paper presents an intelligent supplier management tool (ISMT) using the case-based reasoning (CBR) and neural network (NN) techniques to select and benchmark suppliers. The development of ISMT and how the CBR and NN techniques are used in benchmarking suppliers during the process of new product development in Honeywell Consumer Products (Hong Kong) Limited are presented. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.