Selecting Outsourcing Service Providers: A Fuzzy Linguistic Method

Outsourcing provider selection is an important task for the company. The purpose of this study is to investigate a fuzzy multiple attributes decision-making method for evaluating and selecting outsourcing service provider. In this paper, the multiple attributes should consider in the evaluation process are presented, which includes 5 key attributes according to the literature review. Then, a fuzzy linguistic approach based on 2-tuple linguistic representation is proposed. The linguistic assessment information given by the decision makers are transformed into the form of two-tuple linguistic aggregation operators. The evaluation results of the outsourcing providers can be obtained through the proposed method and then the suitable provider can be selected. Additionally, an illustrating example is given to show the feasibility and practicability of the proposed approach.