A fuzzy-based decision-support model for rebuy procurement

Under rapid innovations and technological changes due to fierce competition, purchasing managers are often faced with a high level of uncertainty in making procurement decisions. To maximize the buying firm' overall performance, managers also need to scrutinize suppliers' performance regarding multiple criteria. This paper proposes a practical decision-support model to deal with the rebuy procurement problem in this common scenario. Based on prior transaction data, the decision-support model enables the purchasing manager to obtain the most preferred solution through an interactive procedure. Thus the proposed model can facilitate self-improving learning effects, and tackle supplier selection problems for multiple items with vague information about the multi-dimensional performance of suppliers. The proposed model is applied to an example problem, in which we select suppliers by considering multi-criteria under the demand constraint of multiple items of varied importance to the buying firm.