A Decision Making Framework for Evaluating Suppliers of Automotive Parts Industry Based on Cognitive Map

Evaluating the suppliers and selecting an appropriate set of them are one of the fundamental strategies to enhancing the product/service quality, and the reputation of the organization. Hence, identifying criteria for suppliers’ evaluation, determining how important they are, and providing a framework for using them in evaluation process, play an important role in the success of an organization. As the evaluation criteria in the real world influence on each other, the actual weights of criteria in this study is achieved by considering both the relations among these criteria and expert’s opinion. Thus, cognitive maps method is used to determine the weight of evaluation criteria with causal relationships between them in the automotive industry. Then, a framework for the evaluation and gradation of suppliers based on the weighted criteria is presented. This framework was implemented in one of the active company in automotive spare parts industry, according to the role of the automotive industry in GDP.