Suppliers Selection In Manufacturing Industries And Associated Multi-Objective Desicion Making Methods: Past, Present And The Future

Nowadays, many manufacturing companies have decided to use other companies’ competencies and outsource part of their manufacturing processes and business to suppliers globally in order to reduce costs, improve quality of products, explore or expand new markets, and offer better services to customers, etc. The decisions have rendered manufacturing organizations with new challenges. Organizations need to evaluate their suppliers' performance, and take account of their weakness and strength in order to win and survive in highly competitive global marketplaces. Hence, suppliers evaluation and selection are taken as an important strategy for manufactring enterprises. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive and critical review on suppliers selection and the formulation of different criteria for suppliers selection, the associated multi-objctive decision makings, selecion algorithms, and their implementation and application perspectives. Furthermore, individual and integrated suppliers selection approaches are presented, including Analytic hierarchy process (AHP), Analytic network process (ANP), and Mathematical programming (MP). Linear programming (LP), Integer programming (IP), Data envelopment analysis (DEA) and Goal programming (GP) are discussed with in-depth. The paper concludes with further discussion on the potential and application of suppliers selection approach for the broad manufacturing industry.