Development of a Rough-MABAC-DoE-based Metamodel for Supplier Selection in an Iron and Steel Industry

In the context of supply chain management, supplier selection can be defined as the process by which organizations score and evaluate a range of alternative suppliers to choose the best possible one who can provide superior quality of raw materials at cheaper rate and lesser lead time. It is a decision making process with multiple trade-offs between various conflicting criteria which in turn helps the organizations identify the suitable suppliers that would establish a robust supply chain assisting in maintaining a competitive edge. The main objective of supplier selection is thus focused on reducing purchase risk, maximizing overall value to the organization, and developing closeness and long-term relationships between the suppliers and the organization. In this paper, while selecting the most suitable supplier for gearboxes in an Indian iron and steel industry, assessments of three decision makers on the performance of five candidate suppliers with respect to five evaluation criteria are first aggregated using rough numbers. The definitive distances of those rough numbers are then treated as the inputs to a 25 full-factorial design plan with the corresponding multi-attributive border approximation area comparison (MABAC) scores as the output variables. Finally, a design of experiments (DoE)-based metamodel is formulated to interlink the computed MABAC scores with the considered criteria. The competing suppliers are ranked based on this rough-MABAC-DoE-based metamodel, which also easies out the computational steps when new suppliers are included in the decision making process.