¹I-Shou University, Kaohsiung County, Taiwan

Correspondence: WC Tsai, 1, Section 1, Hsueh-Cheng Rd, Ta-Hsu Hsiang, Kaohsiung County 84001, Taiwan. E-mail: simont@isu.edu.tw

Received December 2005; Accepted January 2008; Published online 9 July 2008.

Abstract

Supplier evaluation is a multiple attribute decision-making (MADM) problem involving a mixture of qualitative and quantitative attributes. Some mathematical programming techniques have difficulty in dealing with the qualitative attributes that are not easy to measure but very important in supplier evaluation. Fuzzy set theory is useful whenever variables defining a complex and vague system can neither be quantitatively defined nor assigned very precise measures, but are described by linguistic values. This paper presents a procedure for supplier evaluation by incorporating fuzzy set theory into the evaluation process to handle the qualitative attributes in the problem. A mathematical ranking method is used to convert the qualitative attributes into crisp scores. All the quantitative and qualitative performance measures are normalized and then using the proposed model, data are integrated into a single score to rank suppliers. The model application is demonstrated through two previously reported data sets under lean philosophy.