Business process outsourcing enhanced by fuzzy linguistic consensus model

Abstract Business process outsourcing represents a strategic option to obtain the overall improvement of performance in business process management context. It consists in externalizing whole sub-processes (e.g., production, logistics, human resources) of a value chain. Last decade, the concept of value chain moved toward the more flexible concept of value net that implies the assembly of several value chains tailored to specifics, objectives, markets, etc. Thus, the composition of a value chain within a value net environments can be understood as the modeling of a macro business process in which sub-processes can be outsourced. Such composition activity foresees crucial decision-making moments that need to be sustained by a group of decision-makers owning several and heterogeneous competences in order to select the most suitable external providers to which delegate specific sub-processes. This work proposes a framework to enhance business process outsourcing by introducing group decision-making support that relies on a fuzzy linguistic consensus model. In addition, the framework implements algorithms to learn and assign different weights to decision-makers considering the context and time at which they participate in the group decision making. The framework is applied to an Italian footwear company by describing a numerical example.