A fuzzy strategic alliance selection framework for supply chain partnering under limited evaluation resources

Joining a global supply chain (SC) is a critical strategy to stay competitive for today's business. However, numerous decision attributes, either subjective or objective, need to be considered; and these evaluation processes are always complicated and costly. This paper presents a fuzzy decision-making framework for selecting the most favourable strategic SC alliance under limited evaluation resources. Firstly, a generic configuration hierarchy (GCH) is identified which comprises 183 evaluation attributes for general industrial SC partnering consideration. Secondly, to target the specific industry of interest, a customized configuration hierarchy (CCH) is extracted from GCH with basic belief acceptability values for all attributes assigned by experts. Thirdly, adding the evaluation resource constraints to CCH, a 0-1 non-linear programming model is formulated to determine the optimal configuration hierarchy. Fourthly, a fuzzy-rule based relationship intensity function jointly with a fuzzy relationship hierarchy is then constructed to derive and rank the final fuzzy favorabilities for all candidate SCs. Lastly, an illustrative example for a personal computer company that intends to partner with one of three SCs is developed to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework.

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