Supplier selection in webinar supply chain using self-organizing maps and data mining

In today´s competitive world, companies are constantly investigating new approaches for reducing costs. To reach this goal, companies need to carefully plan supply chain management processes. Supplier selection is one of the most important strategic issues in supply chain. Supplier selection in supply chain management is a multi criteria decision making process which consists of both quantitative and qualitative criteria. By the rapid growth of outsourcing, supplier selection has gained significant importance. Customer satisfaction, and also satisfying customer requirements and priorities all depends on proper selection of suppliers. On the other hand, the complexity and importance of supplier selection decisions, makes the necessity of having a well-defined method more vivid. There are many methods in the literature which are proposed for supplier selection but each of them has certain limitations. In this paper, as there has been less attention to the importance of ever increasing electronic supply chain, we aim to provide a suppler selection method for one of the most important electronic supply chain, namely webinar. In the proposed method SOM and data mining techniques are deployed for the selection of best suppliers.