EVALUATION OF SUPPLY CHAIN PERFORMANCE USING AN INTEGRATED TWO-STEP CLUSTERING AND INTERVAL TYPE-2 FUZZY TOPSIS METHOD: A CASE STUDY

Abstract

Supply chain management (SCM) is an important issue for many of the researchers and organizations that have been tackling with it for improving their performance within different perspectives. Various metrics and decision making methodologies have been proposed to evaluate supply chain (SC) performance in different sectors. This paper introduces an integration of the Two-Step Clustering and the interval type-2 (IT2) Fuzzy TOPSIS method for SC performance evaluation processes. In the first step of the proposed integrated approach, Two-Step Clustering analysis (CA) is employed not only for homogenous segmentation of sectors, but also to decrease the dimension of the problem. After obtaining the results, IT2 Fuzzy TOPSIS is used for the evaluation of each company within its cluster. The results of the integrated approach propose a macro perspective on some of the issues such as organizational efficiency and performance. Moreover, the results have shown valuable insight that each company has the opportunity to evaluate itself both against rivals within clusters and inter-sectoral rivals.