Using Multiple Criterial Decision Making Technique For Supplier Selection Descision In Food Industry

Supplier selection is one of the most important functions helping businesses save material cost and increase competitive advantage. The analytic network process(ANP) is a relatively new MCDM method which can deal with all kinds of interactions systematically. But in the ANP procedures, using average method (equal cluster-weighted) to obtain the weighted super-matrix seems to be irrational because there are different degrees of influence among the criteria. This paper proposes an effective solution based on a combined ANP and the Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory(DEMATEL) approach to help companies that need to select the best supplier. The DEMATEL method is used to visualize the structure of complicated causal relationships between criteria of a system and obtain the influence level of these criteria, then adopt these influence level values as the base of normalization super-matrix for calculating ANP weights to obtain the relative importance. In order to do so, first,this paper surveys the multi-criteria supplier selection approaches through a literature review and classification of the international journal articles, revealed that most popular construct and criteria. The second, according the most popular criteria to design DEMATEL questionnaire. Third, managers of Wang Group purchasing department were summoned and surveyed. Then, using an integrated method combined DEMATEL and ANP to analysis and compute the managers’ answer. The result will represent supplier performance to find key factor criteria to improve performance, and propose the most important criteria which affects other criteria and the weight of each criterion. This study conducted a survey via DMATEL and ANP questionnaire for pretest and empirical study. The research results showed that the perceived differences between China and Taiwan in selecting supplier and the inter relationship of supplier selection dimensions and criteria. Finally, this study provided the practical strategy suggestions and recommendations for improving the input resources priority and strategy quality for selecting supplier both in China and Taiwan.