Title: Consultant selection for quality management using VIKOR method under fuzzy environment

Authors: Golam Kabir

Addresses: School of Engineering, University of British Columbia (UBC), Kelowna, British Columbia, V1V 1V7 Canada

Abstract: Meditating entities such as consultants can play an important role in successful total quality management (TQM) programme implementation and helps the organisations to attain competitive advantage. In general, many factors affect the appropriate consultant selection problem which adheres to uncertain and imprecise data, and usually several people from different functional areas of the company are involved in this process. In this paper, an improved and more effective TQM consultant selection model has been developed through integrating VIKOR method with fuzzy set theory. Linguistic ratings are expressed in trapezoidal fuzzy numbers to assess the ratings and weights for these factors. A numerical example is proposed to illustrate an application of the proposed model.

Keywords: consultant selection; multicriteria decision making; MCDM; fuzzy assessment; VIKOR; fuzzy logic; TQM consultants; total quality management; TQM implementation; fuzzy set theory.

DOI: 10.1504/IJMCDM.2014.060423

International Journal of Multicriteria Decision Making, 2014 Vol.4 No.2, pp.96 - 113

Received: 21 Nov 2012
Accepted: 24 Feb 2013

Published online: 17 May 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article