In today's highly competitive global market scenario, manufacturing companies are constantly under pressure to identify ways of optimizing the cost of production. Material purchasing cost plays an important role in deciding the manufacturing cost. The material purchasing cost depends upon the supplier selection process which is a complex process involving qualitative and quantitative criteria. Thus an intelligent supplier selection system is required by managers which help them in identifying the right combination of suppliers so that the total cost of procurement is minimized. The present work discusses the development of an online supplier selection module for a turbine manufacturing company located in India. The objective of the material purchasing department of the user industry is to minimize the total cost of procurement of material by determining the optimum quantity of material to be procured from each supplier satisfying the demand. The system is developed in two phases. The first phase involves the development of a supplier selection system. The system helps in identifying the right combination of suppliers from the available suppliers for a given material. While selecting the suppliers along with the cost of material to be procured from each supplier the minimum and maximum capacities of the suppliers are also taken into consideration. Scenarios are generated with supplier combinations in the form of sets. A heuristic search technique is developed for identifying the best set of suppliers. The second phase involves integrating it with World Wide Web (WWW) which improves the flexibility of the system so that it can help in procuring the material from suppliers distributed around the globe. The primary motivation for adopting this technology is to enable the manufacturers to establish effective supply chains in less time and less cost as compared to traditional procurement methods.
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