A Multi-Criteria Supplier Evaluation Model 1 for Supply Chains

摘要

Supplier evaluation and selection problems are among the most critical logistics decisions that have been addressed extensively in supply chain management. This logistics decision is also important in freight transportation since its results identify trade relationships between business establishments and determine commodity flows between production and consumption points. The commodity flows are used as input to freight transportation models to determine freight movements and their characteristics including mode choice and shipment size. Various approaches have been proposed to explore supplier evaluation and selection problem. Traditionally, potential suppliers were evaluated using only price/cost as the influential criterion. However, in modern supply chain management suppliers are selected using multiple criteria. For different decision–makers (e.g., purchasing managers), different criteria might have dissimilar importance in supplier evaluation and selection. These differences in importance ranking of criteria result from many factors such as business establishments’ logistics and purchasing policy and decision-makers’ characteristics. In this paper, the results of an establishment survey are used to identify important criteria in evaluating and selecting a supplier from decision-making point of view. A system of rank-ordered logit model is developed using survey results to rank criteria and determine their weights for each individual decision-maker. The model uses decision-makers and firm characteristics to rank and weight criteria. The obtained importancerates then will be combined to calculate a final score for each potential supplier. The proposed evaluation model along with an optimization model for supplier selection will be implemented in an activity-based freight transportation modeling framework, called FAME.