Strategic sourcing: a combined QFD and AHP approach in manufacturing

William Ho, Prasanta K. Dey, Martin Lockström, Charlene Xie
2011 Supply chain management  
Supply chain management (SCM) is the process of planning, implementing, and controlling the operations of supply chain as efficiently and effectively as possible. SCM involves forecasting, purchasing, inventory management, information management, quality assurance, scheduling, production, distribution, delivery, and customer service (Stevenson, 2007) . Goffin et al. (2006) have stated that supplier management is one of the key issues of SCM because the cost of raw materials and component parts
more » ... onstitute the main cost of a product and most of the firms have to spend considerable amount of their sales revenues on purchasing, hence supplier selection is one of the most important decision making problems. Ghodsypour and O'Brien (2001) also agreed that selecting the right supplier significantly reduces the purchasing costs and improves corporate competitiveness. Therefore, appropriate supplier selection improves supply chain performance. The conventional approach to supplier selection is to contact as many potential suppliers as possible, issue them with procurement specifications, and ask for quotations. In many cases, the offers would be evaluated and purchase order would be issued to the lowest bidder. Increasingly organizations are going for long-term partnership with their suppliers for strategic items so as to get suggestions for new product development and resolving various operational issues. Choosing the right suppliers involves consideration of many quantitative and qualitative factors other than price alone. Several approaches have been proposed for supplier selection, which also consider multiple and conflicting criteria. However, they have not considered the impact of business objectives and requirements of company stakeholders in identifying criteria for supplier selection. Hence, the selected suppliers may not be able to meet the company objectives. This paper develops an integrated analytical approach for selecting suppliers strategically using a combined QFD and AHP approach. In the approach, multiple evaluating criteria are derived from the requirements of company stakeholders using a series of house of quality (HOQ). The importance of evaluating criteria is prioritized with respect to the degree of achieving the stakeholder requirements using AHP. Based on the ranked criteria, potential suppliers are evaluated using AHP again to make an optimal selection. Bhutta (2003) selected and reviewed 154 journal articles on supplier selection and evaluation for the period 1986-2002. The methods used were individual, including total cost approach, multiple attribute utility theory, total cost of ownership (TCO), AHP, data envelopment analysis, and mathematical programming techniques. Among them, TCO was the most prevalent approach, followed by AHP. Because of this finding, Bhutta and Huq (2002) compared TCO and AHP comprehensively. They revealed that AHP can provide a more robust tool for decision makers to select and evaluate suppliers with respect to qualitative and quantitative criteria, instead of cost data only considered in TCO. Ho et al. (2010) selected and reviewed 70 journal articles on supplier selection and evaluation for the period 2000-2008. Several approaches have been proposed for supplier selection, such as using AHP, analytic network process (ANP), case-based reasoning (CBR), data envelopment analysis (DEA), fuzzy set theory, genetic algorithm (GA), mathematical programming, simple multi-attribute rating technique (SMART), and their integrations. Tables I-II summarize the individual and integrated approaches for supplier selection, respectively. Literature review According to Ho et al. (2010) , the most popular individual approach is DEA. DEA has attracted more attention mainly because of its robustness. In the past, it was used to measure the relative efficiencies of homogeneous decision making units (DMUs) based on numerical data only. As the supplier selection problem involves both qualitative and
doi:10.1108/13598541111171093 fatcat:diubtv4anjbsraycwragndp55m