HOW TO IMPROVE THE SUPPLIERS EVALUATION PROCESS USING FUZZY INFERENCE SYSTEMS

Abstract

Traditional supplier evaluation models are usually highly dependent on the purchasing managers’ know-how and their subjective judgments. Recent years have witnessed the proposal of many models to assist in this type of evaluation some of which are not eligible for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), due to their complexity and difficulty of implementation. Some others, despite its simplicity, often provide performance problems. The goal of this paper is twofold. It seeks to design a supplier evaluation model to be both, robust enough about their valuation method and easy to implement and use. Among the different existing valuation methods, a fuzzy inference system proves its suitability not only because it achieves the goals of the paper, but also because it demonstrates to be more efficient than other traditional assessment methods -such as weighting factors-, and it is widely accepted in SMEs according to the results of an empirical validation study.