A Critical Comparison of Supplier Selection Methodologies

In an extremely competitive market context, consumers demand cheaper and higher quality products, on-time delivery and excellent after-sale services. Therefore, companies are under intense pressure to cut costs while maintaining a high level of quality and after-sale services. Various studies devoted to the analysis of customer-supplier relationships highlighted that, in order to improve the quality of the services and/or of the products provided to the final consumers, careful attention should be paid on the organization and management of the entire supply chain. Moreover, with the trend to outsource a constantly increasing quota of the value-chain activities, purchasing decisions become crucial. For these reasons a key role is played by the supplier evaluation process in order to set up a supply system able to rapidly react to market requirements and innovation process (Gules and Burgess, 1996; Sarkara and Mohapatrab, 2006; Saen, 2007). In particular, suppliers’ selection has assumed a strategic role in determining large customer firms’ competitiveness. Consequently, customers devote more and more resources both to suppliers’ development programs and to early suppliers’ involvement (O’Neal, 2006). In this perspective supplier selection has received extensive attention in the literature (de Boer et al., 2001; Kamann and Bakker, 2004). Most of all, an increasing number of researches has been devoted to the development of different methodologies to cope with this problem (Bruno et al., 2012). Nevertheless, while the number of applications is growing at a steady rate (as shown in Figure 1, showing the number of papers being published yearly 1 ), there is little empirical evidence of the practical usefulness of such tools (Bruno et al., 2012).