A Process-Oriented Mechanism Combining Fuzzy Decision Analysis for Supplier Selection in New Product Development

Abstract

The selection of well-performed supplier involved in new product development (NPD) is one of the most important decision issues in the contemporary industrial field, in which the collaborative design is common. This paper proposes a systematical process-oriented mechanism combining fuzzy arithmetic operations for solving supplier selection problem in the NPD stage. In the proposed mechanism, the Design Chain Operations Reference model (DCOR) developed by Supply Chain Council (SCC) is adopted to describe NPD processes between the business and the candidate suppliers. These processes are deployed by four-level framework, including the top level, the configuration level, the process element level, and the implementation level. Then, the design structure matrix (DSM) is used to analyze the process relationship based on the results from the implementation level. The original DSM is partitioned by the Steward’s method to get reordered DSMs with the interactive process information with respect to the metrics provided by the DCOR. The fuzzy decision analysis is executed to obtain the weighted aggregated scores with respect to the DCOR metrics and to select the best suppliers for different components. Finally, a practical case in Taiwan is demonstrated to show the real-life usefulness of the proposed mechanism.