Optimization Agricultural Supply Chain: A Case Study of Fertilizer Supplier Selection

Abstract

The 21st century is associated with the Industrial Revolution 4.0 and the organic agriculture trend, making the utilization of high-quality fertilizers, abundant nutritional content, economical, and no affect to environment pollution. According to the new concept, clean agricultural production and organic agricultural products are not allowed to excessively use synthetic chemicals such as chemical fertilizers, and plant protection drugs, but priority is to use manure, organic fertilizers, and natural mineral fertilizers. Fertilizer must meet the balanced nutritional requirements of crops, maintain, and improve the fertility of the ground, protect the surrounding ecosystem, and leave harmful effects in agricultural products, products with high quality, safe for users and high economic efficiency for producers. To achieve the above goal, the selection of a fertilizer supplier is an important decision, supporting the supply chain's sustainable development, fertilizer supplier selection is a multicriteria decision making model, the decision maker must assess all qualitative and quantitative factors. In this paper, the author proposed an integer decision making model including Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and Complex Proportional Assessment of Alternatives (COPRAS) for fertilizer supplier selection. The weightings of the criteria are calculated by using FAHP, COPRAS is then applied for ranking some potential fertilizer suppliers. The efficiency of the proposed models is proved by a case study conducted in a farm located in the south of Vietnam. This research is the first fertilizer supplier evaluation and se-lection model in Vietnam by interviewing experts and reviewing the literature. Re-search result is to provide a case study on evaluating supplier in agricultural supply chain utilizing the model proposed by the combination of FAHP and COPRAS models.