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.