Evaluating operational quality of a supply chain: Outsourcing decisions

This paper seeks to propose a methodology to evaluate outsourcing options by taking into account the criteria relating to quality management practices in a supply chain. Multicriteria decision model using Superior and Inferiority Ranking (SIR) method is suggested, as a framework, that supports management to find the optimum outsourcing solution, based on five factors of operational quality. The benefit of the methodology is that it can simultaneously deal with both ordinal and cardinal data, of the outsourcing problem, which is multidimensional in nature, even at different units of analysis, by taking either discreet or fuzzy functions into account. This provides a useful platform for future research studies in supply chain environment for exploring supply quality management practices that would affect the organizational performance.