A structural process-oriented mechanism for supplier selection involved in the early stage of new product development

Abstract

The supplier selection involved in new product development (NPD) is an extremely important decision in contemporary business systems, in which collaborative design is a common feature. The current researchers emphasise studies aimed at finding reasonable supplier indexes or developing good methods for selecting adequate suppliers. There remains a lack of a complete framework for supplier selection in the NPD stage from a process-oriented viewpoint. This paper proposes a unique process-oriented supplier selection mechanism which considers the NPD information process between companies and partners across the design chain. In the proposed mechanism, the design chain operations reference (DCOR) model, including a four-level framework, is adopted to systematically describe NPD processes. Then, the design structure matrix (DSM) is used to analyse the process relationship based on the results from the last level of the DCOR. A method presented by Steward (1981) is applied to partition the DSM so as to obtain the weighted aggregated scores with respect to the metrics provided by the DCOR. Finally, given weights provided by the experts, the cluster analysis is executed to select the best supplier for different processes. To demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed mechanism, a well-known computer manufacturing company in Taiwan was chosen.