Including Supplier Selection Research Articles

Developing a hybrid methodology for green-based supplier selection: Application in the automotive industry

The green performance values of businesses are of great importance in terms of sustainability, which includes long-term economic, social, and environmental effects. Thus, today, enterprises and managers are increasingly interested in this issue, and related topics, including supplier selection, have been inserted into decision-making procedures. However, how to predict the effects of green performance criteria, which represent environmental sustainability, on social and economic sustainability remains unclear. In this regard, the main purpose of this research is to develop a supplier selection methodology considering green performance criteria by applying multiple regression analysis and the Evidential Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making (F-MCDM) method based on Dempster-Shafer Theory (DST), which are both powerful methods in statistical analysis and decision-making under uncertainty. In the first phase of the research, variables that significantly affect green performance have been determined by testing the eight generated hypotheses with multiple regression analysis. Then, the best supplier was determined using those green supplier selection criteria in the Evidential F-MCDM method. Since using environmentally hazardous paints in the production process continues, the automobile paint production sector has been chosen as the application area of this green-based supplier selection methodology. In this respect, green dynamic capacity, green purchasing, eco-design, investment recovery, and green product innovation variables have been inserted into the Evidential F-MCDM method as the determinant variables of green performance. This research reveals that integrating multiple regression and Evidential F-MCDM methods can be a hybrid methodology in supplier selection. Thus, a different perspective is introduced into the green supplier selection decision-making process by considering the effects of criteria in the MCDM model on green performance. This innovation enhances the criteria determination and selection processes in classical MCDM approaches. In addition, green dynamic capacity is the most critical criterion in supplier selection based on their green performance, especially in the scope of this research.

Cooking Up a Sustainable Future: insights of Circular Economy in the Restaurants

Restaurants increasingly prioritize promoting sustainability within their kitchen’s operations, focusing their offers on valuing raw materials as a central point of gastronomy, thus highlighting the importance of local, responsible consumption and respect for nature and the environment. The Circular Economy (CE) emerges as a new sustainability paradigm, uncovering valuable opportunities for organizations and customers, in harmony with the environment. This study aims to characterize good sustainable and circular practices in the restaurant sector, understanding how endogenous products can enhance food waste reduction. Through a qualitative methodology, nine semi-structured exploratory interviews were carried out with restaurant experts, to gain in-depth knowledge into sustainable and CE practices used in restaurants. By conducting a thematic analysis, three main themes emerged 'Positioning and Branding,' 'Circular Economy,' and 'Product and Food Waste'. 'Positioning and Branding' covers the evolution of an eco-conscious mindset in organizations, from the inception of sustainable thinking to the imperative for change. It emerges from the categories: ´Organization, actions, and partnerships’, ‘Challenges and success factors’, and ‘Awareness’. The theme 'Circular Economy,' presents circular practices within daily restaurant operations, their understanding of circular concepts, and the progress made in adopting these behaviors. It arises from three categories: ‘Circularity’, ‘Resource Management’ and ‘Transition’. The 'Product and Food Waste' theme addresses concerns related to product and food waste, including supplier selection, innovative gastronomic offerings, and food waste minimization strategies. It is based on the categories: ‘Suppliers and Raw Materials’, ‘Food Waste Minimization”, and ‘Gastronomic Offer’.The findings reveal a growing awareness of the need for sustainability and circular practices in the restaurant sector. Organizations are actively seeking ways to reduce food waste, optimize sourcing, best operating procedures and offer more sustainable menus representing significant progress toward a more sustainable future in the restaurant business.

An integrated framework for supplier selection and performance evaluation for apparel retail industry

Supplier evaluation, including supplier selection and performance evaluation, has become a critical issue for apparel retailers within the apparel supply chain dealing with severe competition in the global market. An effective evaluation of suppliers requires considering both the quantitative and qualitative performance aspects and integrating the efficiency measurement. In an attempt to address this issue, this study proposes an integrated framework that can handle supplier selection and overall performance evaluation in a comprehensive but feasible manner. The proposed integrated framework customized for apparel retailers combines the current techniques having specific capabilities: data envelopment analysis (DEA), analytical hierarchy process (AHP), and the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). DEA has been used to make the overall performance evaluation, whereas AHP and TOPSIS have been used in combination to provide the quantitative data required by DEA. The proposed integrated framework was implemented and verified using numerical data gathered from a global apparel retailer. The findings revealed that suppliers can be more successful when they put a balanced effort into improving their performance in regards to the important criteria instead of concentrating on only the most important criterion. Moreover, the overall performance evaluation can be much more convenient and rewarding for apparel retailers in terms of finding out the true potential of suppliers when quantitative and qualitative data and efficiency measurements are taken into account at the same time.

Integrated construction supply chain: an optimal decision-making model with third-party logistics partnership

Studies have confirmed the benefits of using Third-party logistics (TPL) for efficient construction management, especially in large projects. Nevertheless, there is a dearth of decision-making models evaluating the exact role of TPL providers as drivers for supply chain (SC) integration and optimisation. This study aims to develop a decision-making model for construction supply chain (CSC) optimisation, with possible TPL integration. The proposed model considers two types of purchased materials (type-1 and type-2) and assists the main contractor in determining construction supply chain management (CSCM) strategies, including supplier selection, order quantity determination, and TPL use evaluation. Using the model, the main contractor can take advantage of the TPL provider’s warehouse and order larger quantities, if necessary, to obtain lower prices offered by suppliers. Through case examples in Canada, we find that the proposed model performs better in optimising total SC cost, as compared to the model without TPL. Model validations also show that TPL can be conditionally used to improve construction logistics performance and to meet practical requirements targeting issues in the construction industry.

Service network design with equilibrium-driven demands

We study a service network design problem in which the network operator wishes to determine facility locations and sizes in order to satisfy the demand of the customers while balancing the cost of the system with a measure of quality-of-service faced by the customers. We assume customers choose the facilities that meet demand, in order to minimize their total cost, including costs associated with traveling and waiting. When having demand served at a facility, customers face a service delay that depends on the total usage (congestion) of the facility. The total cost of meeting a customer’s demand at a facility includes a facility-specific unit travel cost and a function of the service delay. When customers all minimize their own costs, the resulting distribution of customer demand to facilities is modeled as an equilibrium. This problem is motivated by several applications, including supplier selection in supply chain planning, preventive healthcare services planning, and shelter location-allocation in disaster management. We model the problem as a mixed-integer bilevel program that can be reformulated as a nonconvex mixed-integer nonlinear program. The reformulated problem is difficult to solve by general-purpose solvers. Hence, we propose a Lagrangian relaxation approach that finds a candidate feasible solution along with a lower bound that can be used to validate the solution quality. The computational results indicate that the method can efficiently find feasible solutions, along with bounds on their optimality gap, even for large instances.

Strategic Selection and Empowerment of Supplier Portfolios Case: Oil and Gas Industries in Iran

Supplier selection and empowerment can become a competitive advantage in portfolio of projects. The general industry trends have focused recently more on consolidation and streamlining the supply base as part of overall supply chain rationalization to weed out suppliers that do not meet company needs. The strategic process of supplier management is replacing the function of purchasing. The proposed model here takes from company's strategy incorporating top level policies and requirements. This paper aims to develop a fundamental framework for Supplier Portfolio management, including supplier selection and empowerment, based on the company's corporate and procurement strategies, to combine similar requirements from various projects into attractive package of business for suppliers who are then selected not only based on their price and quality but also by strategic partnership initiatives and long-term development outlooks. In this model, outsourced items are grouped into two distinct 80-20% Pareto sets. The first set, 80% of non-critical items, with 20% price, may still be purchase with simple or traditional methods. The second set, 20% of is chosen within Supplier Portfolio methodologies looking at corporate, business, and procurement strategic elements. The model is applied to project-based Oil and Gas industries in Iran, where numerous development and expansion projects are underway using local and international suppliers for Goods, Works, and Services. Strategic Selection of supplier portfolio has saved cost and risk in overall procurement, and increased effectiveness and quality of supplies. The model may be generalized to other industries worldwide, where project procurement is on-going business for a large set of projects with common requirements.

MC supply chain distributed scheduling based on heterogeneous multiple ant colony algorithm

The deficiencies of the existing Mass Customization ( MC) supply chain scheduling models were summarized. According to the characteristics of distributed scheduling and large scaled computing, a MC supply chain scheduling model was designed. Heterogeneous multiple ant colony algorithm was presented to achieve this scheduling model. This algorithm introduced more than one type of ant colony. All types of ant colonies with different pheromone updating mechanism and searching traits had mutual compensation of advantages as well as mutual competitive exclusion so that they can potentially cooperate smoothly. Collaborations among ant colonies distributed in different location of supply chain fully took the advantages of whole computing resources of supply chain, obtained fairly solving speed, and fulfilled scheduling requirements of multi- order including supplier selection and inter-enterprise scheduling. Finally practical manufacture case was used to prove the proposed algorithm model's validity, stability and order adaptability.

Interorganizational cost management in the exchange process

This paper explores interorganizational cost management (IOCM) practices in the exchange process. IOCM can be defined as buyers’ and suppliers’ coordinated efforts to reduce costs. Past research has primarily argued that such practices depend on component characteristics, relationship characteristics, and characteristics of the transaction. Based on a study of three buyer–supplier relationships, this article also finds variations in IOCM practices between six main activities in the exchange process. In this process, the supplier's management accounting is found to be more important than recognized by prior research. The deepest collaboration around IOCM issues and the greatest joint use of suppliers’ management accounting in the three cases typically occurs in earlier activities in the exchange process, including supplier selection, joint product design and joint manufacturing process development. In later activities in the process, during full-speed production as well as in product and manufacturing process redesign, suppliers’ managerial accounting plays a lesser role in our study.

A Note on a Simple Dynamic Programming Approach to the Single-Sink, Fixed-Charge Transportation Problem

The single-sink, fixed-charge transportation problem has a variety of applications, including supplier selection, product distribution/fleet selection, and process selection. In this paper we present a dynamic programming algorithm for solving this important problem that is very easy to implement and that improves considerably in terms of computational attractiveness on the best methods in the literature.