A Web Based Procurement Decision Support System

Abstract: In many firms the value of purchased materials and components accounts for 50-80 % of total cost of goods sold. Selecting suppliers in a global economical environment is not an easy task: first there is the large number of possible suppliers, many accessible via the Internet, and secondly there are the usual price and quality conditions that must be taken into account. Thus, supplier selection is a problem that includes both qualitative and quantitative factors. To address this problem, a procurement methodology and a supportive Decision Support System (DSS) are proposed. The DSS runs in a Web based environment, and is able to maintain data regarding quality for each pair supplier/product, collect proposals from the Web, and build and solve an Integer Linear Programming problem with the help of a solver