Reza Farzipoor Saen - Associate Professor, Department of Industrial Management, Management and Accounting Faculty, Islamic Azad University

Efficient Supply Chain Management (SCM) requires efficient vendor selection. Although the problem involving the multi-criteria nature of vendor selection has been solved, the emergence of a slightly-nonhomogeneous situation becomes a major obstacle for procurement managers in finding the best purchasing strategy. The assumption of classical vendor selection models is based on complete homogeneity of vendors. In spite of this assumption in many applications some vendors do not comprehensively consume common inputs to comprehensively supply common outputs. The objective of this paper is to propose a straightforward model for selecting slightly non-homogeneous vendors. A numerical example demonstrates the application of the proposed method.

Vendor selection, Slightly non-homogeneous vendors, Data envelopment analysis, Interval data, Missing values