Automated Reasoning for Supplier Performance Appraisal in Supply Chains

Supplier sorting after an evaluation process in many organizations is a routine task required by a quality assurance program or as a Supply Chain Management (SCM) regular practice in order to ensure service and efficiency, two main objectives of SCM. By using a fuzzy multicriteria over-ranking method, it is possible to create automated reasoning systems for dealing with high volume of data in a timely manner. The contribution of this paper is to show an actual industrial application solved with a new method derived from the classical Promethee® approach. The problem deals with assigning a category to the supplier which is different from the well-known problem of supplier ranking very abundant in the literature. The method uses Flowsort® algorithm for classifying providers into categories. The categories are in order to decide the outcome of a Logistics Service Provider; that is, to continue being a partner until a new appraisal exercise, to continue but with correcting measures, or to be dismissed due to low performance. An example of the application is developed for a major supplier of mining operations in Chile and directions for other uses of the method are given. © 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V.