Supplier Selection in E-Procurement

In today’s competitive business world, it is extremely important for decision makers to have access to decision support tools in order to make quick, right and accurate decisions. One of these decision making areas is supplier selection in e-procurement. Supplier selection is a multi-criteria decision making problem that deals with the optimization of conflicting objectives such as quality, cost, and delivery time. In spite of the fact that the term “supplier selection” is commonly used in the literature, and many methods and models have been designed to help decision makers, few efforts have been dedicated to develop a system based on any of these methods. In this paper, we review, categorize, and discuss the literature, as well as the most widely used supplier selection criteria and their relative importance. We propose a supplier selection system based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method which has been commonly used for multi-criteria decision making problems. Inasmuch as we believe that fuzzy concepts extend the capability of any modeling approach, integrating fuzzy concepts into our model will lead to a more powerful system. To support this idea and to facilitate decision making in the supplier selection process, we implemented linear and non-linear fuzzy programming approaches on a chosen business scenario.