Supplier evaluation with quality-based fuzzy data

Supplier evaluation and selection is one of the most critical activities of purchasing management in a supply chain. On the regular basis, managers constantly evaluate quality characteristics of suppliers´ products and make decisions to select preferred suppliers. Fuzzy quality data commonly exists in the reality world. Under this fuzzy environment, we propose a quality-based supplier evaluation based on the fuzzy-capability index (FCI) in this paper. We first apply the resolution identity theorem to construct the membership function of FCI for each supplier. With these FCIs´ membership functions, a ranking method known as a fuzzy preference relation of FCI is then adopted to select the preferred suppliers. Finally, a case study of touch screens is provided to illustrate the applicability of incorporating the fuzzy quality data into the problem of quality-based supplier evaluation and selection.