Evaluation and selection of suppliers using network analysis process and VIKOR methods

Today, due to widespread competition and the presence of interconnected manufacturing environments, supplier performance is an effective factor in the success or failure of companies. The decision to select a supplier is also an important factor in the production and support management of many companies. The supply chain has a special and important position in the strategic management literature. The supply chain is referred to activities related to suppliers of raw materials or services and consumers or customers and producers of the product or the service itself. Evaluation and selection of suppliers is one of the key elements in industrial purchase processes and seems to be one of the main activities of specialized industries. Selecting suppliers is multi-criteria decision-making. To solve this problem, several methods have been proposed in the theoretical literature of the study. This paper presents a conceptual framework for selecting the best supplier by considering several criteria. The proposed framework includes the weights obtained for the criteria by the network analysis process method. Also, by identifying the effective quantitative and qualitative criteria in suppliers' prioritization in the supply chain, the integrated VIKOR-ANP approach is used to provide a method to prioritize suppliers in the supply chain with a combination of qualitative and quantitative criteria. The ANP method is used to evaluate the alternatives to the quality criteria and to obtain the relative weight of the criteria and the VIKOR is used for the final ranking of the alternatives.

Keywords:

Strategic management , Suppliers selection , Network analysis method , VIKOR analysis