Multi-objective decision making for supplier selection in outsourcing.

摘要

A supply chain is the system of organizations, people, technology, activities, information, and resources involved in moving a product or service from supplier to customer. The main and basic challenges in the supply chain are to plan a strategy to manage the resources and meet the demands, to select the suppliers that will deliver the goods and services that are required to build the product, to manufacture the product, to deliver the product to the customers and to make an arrangement for return of the products through customers if there is any fault in the product for servicing. This thesis study concentrates on supplier selection problem. Recently, outsourcing has become the prime part of the company. The activities which are not core to the business or not feasible to manufacture in-house are being outsourced to suitable suppliers. The major hurdle in outsourcing is to select a suitable supplier. The right supplier will lead to the fulfillment of the company's needs and will help increase the financial stability as well as the reputation of the company in the market. The selection of suppliers depends on number of criteria and it is possible that one supplier satisfies some of the selected criteria, a company is looking in to, but not the remaining others and the other supplier may satisfy the other ones but not the first ones. The challenge is to optimize selection process based on critical criteria and select the best supplier(s). The supplier selection problems are multi-objective problems and no single methodology appears to be dominant in solving supplier selection problem. This thesis study has attempted to advance the art of supply chain management by developing a heuristic methodology "Integrated Evolutionary Goal Trade-off (IEGT) Method" which simplifies the task of supplier selection and reduces the tediousness as well as the degree of error by directly involving the Decision Maker into the selection process. The "IEGT" method is highly efficient and it implements the procedure or steps of the Posteriori Articulation method in which after the solutions are presented to the Decision Maker, it incorporates combination of different methods like Evolutionary Algorithm Method, Goal Programming Method and STEM Method to reach the final optimal supplier(s).