Assessment of Customer Trust Level in Supply Chains Based on Information Sharing Dimensions

Customer trust in suppliers becomes today one of the most important criteria for evaluating partners and establishing efficient supply chain partnerships. Decision makers need to assess this intangible criterion with regards to its influencing factors in order to integrate it in their decisional processes. In this paper, a customer trust index is designed as the trust level arising from the information sharing degree and quality related to the information delivered by a supplier to the considered enterprise. A rule-based fuzzy logic approach is designed in order to help assessing the customer trust level with respect to information sharing dimensions. A real supply chain from the textile industry is considered for validating the rules and testing the global approach. Results of the application show that there are large differences of weights and impacts between the information-related factors that build the customer trust concept.