A fuzzy MCDM approach for supplier selection and evaluation: A case study in an automobile manufacturing company

Competitive international business environment has forced many firms to focus on supply chain management to gain competitive advantages. During recent years, supplier selection process in the supply chain has become a key strategic consideration because most of the firms have been spending considerable amount of their revenues on purchasing. However, In general, many quantitative and qualitative factors such as quality, Price, flexibility and delivery performance must be considered to determine suitable suppliers. This means that the nature of supplier selection decisions usually is complex and unstructured. This paper is aimed to present a fuzzy decision-making approach to deal with the supplier selection problem. We generalize TOPSIS to fuzzy multiple-criteria decision-making. TOPSIS is one of the well-known and widely accepted methods for multiple criteria decision making (MCDM). We use triangular fuzzy numbers to express linguistic values of experts' subjective preferences. The application process has been demonstrated with a real case study in an automobile manufacturing company. The study was followed by the sensitivity analyses of the results.