A New Decision Support System for Supplier Selection Using Boolean Algebra

Abstract

For organizations operating with number of products/services and number of suppliers, to select the right supplier meeting all their requirements will be a challenging job. Such organizations need a good decision support system to evaluate the suppliers effectively. Several decision support systems have been reported to deal with complex selection process to decide the right supplier. Many mathematical models have also been developed. This paper presents a new method, named as Bit Decision Making (BDM) method, which treats such complex system of decision making as a collection and sequence of reasonable number of meaningful and manageable sub-systems by identifying and processing the relevant decision criteria in each sub-system. Help of Boolean logic and Boolean algebra is taken to assign binary digit values to the selection criteria and generate mathematical equations that correlate the inputs to the output at each stage of decision making. Each sub-system with its own mathematical model has been treated as a standardized decision sub-system for that phase of making decision in evaluating suppliers. The sequence and connectivity of the sub-systems along with their outputs finally lead to selection of the best supplier. A real-world case of evaluation of information technology (IT) tenders has been dealt with for application of the proposed method. The paper discusses in detail the theory, methodology, application and features of the new method.