A New Method for Selecting the Most Appropriate Suppliers in the Supply Chain using DEA

Abstract

It is widely accepted that in today's competitive world, rapid changes in the field of industrial, economic, and commercial activities, as well as the complexity of the competitive environment between public and private companies have induced them to use new tools and models to improve the performance and efficiency of their supply chain. Assessing and selecting efficient suppliers is one of the critical issues in this regard. The special problem examined in this study is a particular status of suppliers in the supply chain, which includes a multi-stage system. Such system consists of several sections, so that the sectors have a number of inputs and outputs that are producing separately and independently. Each one of the inputs is also created from several different status, and outputs have several indicators. The purpose of the paper is to provide a new method for selecting the most suitable suppliers in the supply chain by means of data envelopment analysis. The basis of the work is that, considering the supply chain as a parallel network, we consider each possibility of occurrence in this network as a DMU. So, the space of supply chain will be transformed to DEA space and having the DMUs, as required, from DEA solutions, we choose the most efficient suppliers.