An integrated multi-criteria group decision-making approach to efficient supplier selection and clustering using fuzzy preference relations

In the last decades, supply chain management (SCM) has become a significant issue in real life and in the literature due to increasing globalisation. Moreover, supplier selection and periodical evaluation has become an important tool for the companies in order to maintain an effective SCM. The main goal of this study is to construct an integrated method to build a decision support system for supplier evaluation and selection that incorporates quantitative and qualitative calculations together to deal with vague and uncertain data available to decision makers. A methodology, which is capable of evaluating and monitoring suppliers' performance, is constructed, using fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to weight the established decision criteria and ELECTRE III to evaluate, rank and classify performance of suppliers regarding relative criteria. The proposed methodology is applied to a real-life supplier-selection and classification problem of a pharmaceutical company.