Strategic supplier selection in the added-value perspective:: An AI approach

Supplier selection constitutes one of the most crucial components of the purchasing function, being essential to improve the entity's competitiveness and to increase customer satisfaction. There are different proposals to perform this task, being the added-value perspective one of the most interesting. This theory uses both quantitative and qualitative data for supplier selection, being its main aim to calculate the ability of the supplier to create value for the customer. However, difficulties in the measurement of qualitative items usually avoid its application, reducing firm's capacity to improve efficiency. To solve it, we intend to combine both types of data, using Fuzzy Theory and new emergent paradigms, to obtain an overall ranking of suppliers' suitability.