Critic and Maut Methods for the Contract Manufacturer Selection Problem

Abstract

Nowadays companies should respond and satisfy the customer needs effectively and quickly to establish a position in the competitive market. One of the ways of achieving these goals is the outsourcing their some manufacturing operations to contract manufacturers. Outsourcing manufacturing operation to contract manufacturers decreases the operational cost, increases the profit and provides the flexibility of production capability. So the selecting a contract manufacturer for a company is an important problem that must be dealt very carefully. This selection is influenced by quantitative and qualitative criteria and it is handled as Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem. In this paper, CRITIC (CRiteria Importance Through Intercriteria Correlation) and MAUT (Multi Attribute Utility Theory) methods are applied to the contract manufacturer selection problem. The weights of the contract manufacturer selection criteria are derived from CRITIC method whereas the complete ranking of the contract manufacturer alternatives are obtained by using MAUT. Finally the results are discussed.