THE PROCESS OF DECISION MAKING REGARDING

Abstract

Nowadays, the relationships between buyers and suppliers have not more adversarial nature. The concept of partnerships or strategic alliances in supply chain management have becoming a prevailing factor in the process of supplier selection and evaluation, because collaborate with suppliers is an efficient strategy to get competitive advantage. However the task of select and evaluate suppliers is a complex matter because involves several conflicting criteria, which can have qualitative and quantitative nature, then this task has a multicriteria focus. In order to choose the most appropriate partner, the companies should define an adequate set of criteria and a set of potential suppliers, besides that a multicriteria method needs to be chosen to establish the preferences structure of the decision makers involved in this process. These decision makers are is most time the people in charge of Purchasing activity, nevertheless in many times, professionals from Logistics, Quality and the director of SCM can be also involved. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the importance of classify supplier to different levels of partnerships according his performance in a set of metrics/criteria, through a multicriteria method. A numerical application in presented to illustrate the method applied, which is the ELECTRE III. Moreover applying multicriteria methods the decision makers can have a structured way to choose an appropriate partner and share the benefits from partnerships with the entire supply chain.