Enhancing the efficacy of supplier selection decision-making on the initial stage of new product development: A hybrid fuzzy approach considering the strategic and operational factors simultaneously

The majority of the existing supplier selection approaches obtained their optimal solutions based on the operational metrics. This study considers the strategic and operational factors simultaneously to secure the efficacy of supplier selection (VS) on initial stage of new product development (NPD). We suggest strategic factors come from the supplier’s management system itself (i.e., customer-, long-term-, and process-oriented criteria) while the related performances indices of supplier constitute operational factors (i.e., producer-, short-term- and outcome-oriented criteria). The work adopts supplier’s process capability indices (PCIs) and process yields as operational factors to estimate their quality capabilities. The business process-oriented criteria related with the performance of business process improvement (BPI) are employed as the strategic criteria for supplier assessment visit. A fuzzy approach with supply risk consideration is employed then to aggregate the total scores of individual suppliers objectively. An empirical case study is performed to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed system and to identify the best potential supplier(s) for further development. The results and processes of the case study also provide interesting managerial implications. The derived application of Herzberg’s two-factor theory to the realm of supplier selection is discussed as well.