AN OBJECTIVE METHOD OF SUPPLIERS' PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

摘要

The rapid development of computer network technology impacts every aspect of the supply chain management. Such an important aspect is the performance evaluation and selection on suppliers. Compared with the convenience of supplier's information collection, it is still quite hard to evaluate the supplier's performance objectively. This is because the evaluation is usually a multi-objective decision-making problem. By far the most utilized approach has been the linear weighting method, which places a weight on each objective. The weights are determined by the decision makers subjectively which influences the objectiveness of the evaluation results considerably. In this paper, a new supplier performance evaluation method is presented by using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). This method is based upon an objective orientation. It begins with objective numerical data and then utilizes linear fractional programming to derive an efficiency measure for each supplier. The most important feature of the method is its objectiveness, i.e., it is unnecessary to determine the weight of each factor subjectively. Also, it is unnecessary to determine the complex relation formulas among the factors, which often causes the computation complexity. Therefore, this method is very suitable for appraising suppliers synthetically and objectively. This paper introduces the DEA models and discusses the supplier evaluation method with DEA. Also, the description on the implementation of the method and an example are given to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach.