Multicriteria Approach for Supplier Selection: Evidence from a Case Study in the Fashion Industry

Abstract

Worldwide manufactures are redesigning supply chains, often outsourcing with the aim of maintaining a competitive advantage and gaining market share. When selecting and purchasing fabrics, firms should actively cooperate with suppliers, to meet customers’ needs. In this view, the supplier selection process plays a key role in keeping a competitive edge in global markets. Therefore, this study proposes a multicriteria decision-making model (MCDM) to ease supplier evaluation and selection. Supply chain operation reference metrics (SCOR metrics) and fuzzy technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (FTOPSIS) are combined to build a model for supplier selection. The former allows us to conduct a very thorough fact-based analysis of all features in the supply chain, while the combination of fuzzy theory and SCOR model allows us to deal with uncertainty. The main novelty of this method is that it incorporates a consolidated supply chain management criteria within the framework of fuzzy set theory and multicriteria decision-making model (MCDM) facilitating their application into practice. The proposed approach is tested by considering the case of a manufacturing firm in the fashion industry willing to designate the most appropriate supplier within a set of three potential ones.

Sustainable Supplier Selection through Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) Approach: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…Through a bibliometric analysis, this paper provides a comprehensive overview of multi-criteria methods, allowing academics to better understand the existing landscape and expected growth trends of multi-criteria decision-making methods. Indicative of future performance, by highlighting the need to study the origins and spread of certain methods and their variants, broaden studies in the selected nations, and explore their scientific output on the topic under investigation, and use what you learn, topic modeling helps unearth hidden patterns in the studied database and standardize practice differences and how they connect to other fields of study [69,70,73,90]. In reality, there is a limited number of studies that have examined the potential prerequisites for employing specific multicriteria decision making (MCDM) methodologies, such as independence [14], the limitation of qualities, both in terms of quantity and size, and the examination of characteristics, as well as the transformation of qualitative characteristics [22].…”

Global Conditions and Changes in the Level of Renewable Energy Sources

“…Both the TOPSIS and EDAS methods incorporate normalization techniques. In MCDM models, the normalization process aligns all variables adopted in the study, ensuring their mutual comparability [43,44]. The methods of normalizing data in MCDA can be categorized into two main groups: profit-oriented methods and methods that consider cost criteria [44,45].…”

Efficiency evaluation and loan assessment of fashion upcyclers in Liberia using fuzzy, DEA and FIS models

“…Fuzzy logic, combined with AHP, has widely been used to address the subjectivity and ambiguity of human judgments (Mondragon et al , 2021; Pitchipoo et al , 2013). A combination of the two models has been excessively used in the fashion and textile industries to develop an intelligent fashion recommending system (Wang et al , 2015), to analyze sustainable practices in the apparel industry (Vishwakarma et al , 2022), for supplier selection in online fashion retail (Caristi et al , 2022; Kaushik et al , 2022) and to develop a conceptual framework for functional, expressive and aesthetic considerations in designing raincoats for children aged seven and eight (Pu et al , 2020).…”