Partner Selection in Virtual Enterprise: A DEA Approach

As a dynamic, temporary alliance, virtual enterprise plays an important role for firms to face the global competition. Among many actions in the virtual enterprise running, virtual enterprise construction is the one which impacts virtual enterprise performance most direct and deeply, however, partner selection decision is the key of the virtual enterprise construction. This paper mainly helps to solve two problems: one is to determine which indices should be considered in the partner evaluation; the other is to decide which candidate is the best one to select. The paper elaborates on the partner selection problem and proposes a DEA-based integrated model, which combines the previous DEA achievements into one model such as specific factors, unrealistic weight elimination and full ranking technique. The proposed method can be proven as an effective tool to select the best partner, as illustrated by a representative partner selection example.