| The objective of this dissertation is to develop the decision support system to help companies improve their supply agility by focusing on the purchasing decisions and processes.; Under today's volatile business environment, companies are reaching the point where they need to be more agile---intelligent, fast, flexible, and responsive to changes. Leveraging supplier-buyer relationships to create agile supply chains is one of the strategies that can help companies make a successful transition to an agile enterprise. The increasing reliance on suppliers to deliver the values to customers has transformed a purchasing function to become a revenue driver and a vital determinant to ensure the profitability and the survival of businesses. The focus on change response abilities has affected the purchasing strategy and practices taken by companies to master and respond to changes as well as created the needs for a new set of tools to support the purchasing-related decisions.; In this dissertation, we propose a comprehensive, modular decision support system, which includes tools, models, and framework to assist companies in making three key purchasing decisions, the supplier-buyer relationship establishment, the supplier performance evaluation, and the supplier selection and order allocation. Our developments and analysis relies on the Quality Function Deployment (QFD), the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), and the stochastic programming technique. The final deliverables include: (1) The new QFD-based model, Agile Supply Chain Transformation Matrix (ASCTM), for determining appropriate strategy and approaches for supply chain configuration and supplier-buyer relationship establishment; (2) The comprehensive framework consisting of tools, metrics, and model structures for evaluating supplier's agile performance; and (3) The Stochastic Supplier and Order Allocation Portfolio model (S-SOAP) for determining the purchasing decision related to supplier selection, contract establishment, and order allocation assignment under uncertainty. |
