Determining Strategy Based Supplier Pre-Qualification Criteria With Fuzzy Relational Maps

Supplier Selection is one of the most studied areas in management and decision sciences. However, it is still a highly problematic subject since decision-makers take an educated guess after a certain stage in real life practices. In order to overcome the problems, decision makers should focus their attention on the first stage of the selection process, criteria determination, as the quality of the selection phase heavily depends on the first stage. Additionally, strategic fitness in supplier selection is also not much considered in the literature and real life practices. However, looking for conformity of supplying organizations with corporate strategies of buying organization is crucial for the success and leadership of the buying organization. Therefore, this paper intends to determine the most influential corporate strategy based supplier pre-qualification criteria. Data acquisition phase of the Delphi technique was used for determining criteria and fuzzy relational maps was used for relating criteria with corporate strategies. All data were collected from a global Tier-1 manufacturing company in the automotive industry. The results show that the most important strategy based criteria were mainly about organizational and managerial characteristics of the company. Cost and price, which are considered very important in the literature and in real life practices, were determined as moderately important in strategic context. Companies need to focus their attention on criteria such as technical qualification of employees, continuous improvement systems, and communication abilities when pre-qualifying suppliers.