A QFD-ANP method for supplier selection with benefits, opportunities, costs and risks considerations

This paper presents an original integrated procedure to evaluate and select suppliers for purchasing decisions. The procedure exploits the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) approach to define the suppliers’ characteristics, coupled with the Analytic Network Process (ANP) to capture the interrelations among the selection criteria, and integrated with a Benefits, Opportunities, Costs, and Risks (BOCR) analysis. As such, the proposed approach is more structured than the existing methods for supplier selection; in particular, it allows simultaneously to take into account the relevant criteria for supplier selection, to capture the situation where the decision criteria are somehow dependent on one another, and to evaluate the positive and negative aspects of the selection process. By using the proposed approach, companies can derive useful information to guide their partner selection process. An extensive case study is reported to show the application of the model to a selection process of a real Italian company. The application shows that the model is effective in identifying the most suitable supplier; moreover, a detailed sensitivity analysis highlights that the results of the ranking are very robust against possible changes in the relative importance of the BOCR perspectives