Title: Selection of supplier management policies using clustering and fuzzy-AHP in the retail sector

Authors: Nicolas Clavijo Buriticá; Mónica Yoshida Matamoros; Felipe Castillo; Esteban Araya; Gerardo Ahumada; Gustavo Gatica

Addresses: Department of Civil and Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana de Cali, Cali, Colombia ' Program of Industrial Engineering, Fundación Universitaria Agraria de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia ' Department of Engineering Sciences, Faculty of Engineering, Universidad Andrés Bello, Santiago, Chile ' Department of Engineering Sciences, Faculty of Engineering, Universidad Andrés Bello, Santiago, Chile ' Department of Engineering Sciences, Faculty of Engineering, Universidad Andrés Bello, Santiago, Chile ' Department of Engineering Sciences, Faculty of Engineering, Universidad Andrés Bello, Santiago, Chile

Abstract: Supplier development contributes to supply chain integration and performance, thus playing an essential role in any industry. In the retail market, no formal procedures exist for the selection-assignment of supplier development programs, meaning that respective management is complex and unclear given actor and requirement heterogeneities. Multi-criteria techniques are currently used for selection and evaluation processes. However, no models exist that integrate clustering and multi-criteria techniques together to efficiently select-assign supplier development programs. This study proposes a four-phase methodology - diagnosis, program design, assignment, and proposal - that considers supplier clustering through K-means and multi-criteria fuzzification. Additionally, case-study analysis of 149 retail suppliers in Colombia clustered businesses into high (8), medium (32), and low (109) risk sets, each of which was assigned tailored development programs. The obtained results support use of the proposed methodology to improve supply chain performance for organisations with many suppliers requiring development programs.

Keywords: fuzzy logic; multiple criteria analysis; analytic hierarchy process; supplier selection; retail; clustering.

DOI: 10.1504/IJLSM.2019.103089

International Journal of Logistics Systems and Management, 2019 Vol.34 No.3, pp.352 - 374

Received: 07 Oct 2017
Accepted: 30 Mar 2018

Published online: 15 Oct 2019 *

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