Robust approach to DEA technique for supplier selection problem: A case study at Supplying Automative Parts Company (SAPCO)

In many industries such as automotive industry, there are a lot of suppliers dealing with the final products manufacturer. With growing numbers of suppliers, the suppliers’ efficiency measurement often becomes the most significant concern for manufacturers. Therefore, various performance measurement models such as DEA, AHP, TOPSIS, are developed to support supplier selection decisions. After an exhaustive review of the supplier selection methods, we employ data envelopment analysis (DEA) for computing the relative efficiency of the suppliers and introducing the most efficient supplier as a benchmark. In reality, there are large amounts of uncertainty regarding the suppliers’ measurements; therefore, we propose the robust optimization approach to the real application of DEA (RDEA). In this approach, uncertainties about incomes and outcomes of decision making units (DMUs) are involved in the relative suppliers’ efficiencies. The proposed RDEA approach is utilized for the selection of suppliers which manufacture the automotive safety components in Supplying Automotive Parts Company (SAPCO), an Iranian leading automotive enterprise. Numerical example will illustrate how our proposed approach can be used in the real supplier selection problem when considerable uncertainty exists regarding the suppliers’ input and output data.