Selecting Suppliers in Manufacturing and Engineering Companies

Because of the increasing importance of suppliers to achieve competitive advantages, literature proposes different methods to help decision makers to face the complexity of the supplier selection process. However, these methods often face with this process as a single and one-dimensional problem. Also, these methods do not consider unreliability and ambiguity of supplier selection problem. But, supplier selection process needs a multi stage approach. This paper intends to propose a comprehensive multi stage approach to integrating supplier selection process. This approach tries to decrease ambiguity of this problem by using Fuzzy QFD approach and the concept of House of Quality. A Fuzzy algorithm is used to defining linguistic variables to express relative importance of inner variables (WHATs) and outer variables (HOWs) of house of quality and their interrelations. Finally, a case study is presented to illustrate this approach is applicable. In addition to ranking and selecting final supplier, the findings of study show human resource, infrastructures, and IT are the most important criteria to evaluating suppliers and technical and functional quality and after sale services of product are the most characteristics of product.