A soft approach to supplier selection problem for a steel company under future uncertainty

The steel industry is a whole industry worldwide and a fundamental industry sector in the national economy. It is undeniable that raw materials are an essential part of a steel company's operations. Therefore, steel companies require reliable and valid raw material suppliers. One of the strategic activities of supply chain management is selecting suitable suppliers. Supplier selection (SS) is a multi-criteria decision-making process and requires a comprehensive evaluation process, often under uncertain conditions. While the application of MCDM tools is continuously growing in the SS literature, these tools can not cope with future or environmental uncertainty. The matrix approach to robustness analysis as a method capable of covering this type of uncertainty has a fundamental weakness; This approach uses only one criterion to check the performance of alternatives. This point has been considered in this study. For this purpose, a study has been conducted in a steel manufacturing company to choose the most suitable supplier among the four. Based on the proposed approach, problem owners defined future scenarios by considering different states of economic, social, and environmental variables. Then, the performance of the suppliers was judged by experts according to the cost, quality, time, supply security, and capacity criteria in the form of future scenarios. Finally, we placed the average performance of the suppliers in the five criteria in the decision matrix and prioritized them. The results showed that supplier A3 is the best option.