Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
1 Introduction
Managing supplier quality is vital for ef
cient functioning of modern supply chains
and achieving customer satisfaction. Poor quality of materials from suppliers can
lead to high internal and external failure costs for organizations. To avoid these
costs, organizations need to adopt a pro-active approach in managing product
quality. This involves assuring quality in all stages of product development from
conceptual design, procurement, processing, packaging until delivery to customer.
It is useful to maintain and record product and service data to monitor changes in
quality performance over time for selecting quality product and services from
suppliers.
In literature, several studies have been reported by researchers on quality assur-
ance in supply chain management. Foster (
2007
) presents a detailed study of
approaches for managing quality in supply chains namely supplier quality man-
agement, voice of the customer, voice of the market, statistical process control,
quality management standards, and six sigma. Flynn and Flynn (
2005
) study the
implications of synergies between supply chain management and quality manage-
ment. Their research emphasizes on developing cumulative capabilities with sup-
pliers than trade-off orientations (usually for minimizing costs). In other words,
seeing them as partners and not adversaries and involving them in product and
process development. Bessant et al. (
1994
) investigate the role of greater cooperation
and collaboration among organizations for managing successful total quality rela-
tionships in the supply chain. Casadesus and Castrao (
2005
) analyse the effect of ISO
9000 on improving quality in supply chain management and found it to be effective
in areas of improving supplier relationships, customer satisfaction and reducing non-
conformity costs. They also encourage enterprises to adopt modern process change
initiatives such as business process redesign and enterprise resource planning (ERP)
systems. Foster and Ogden (
2008
) present the differences in how operations and
supply chain managers approach quality management. Their study found that
operations managers tend to manage supply chain relationship through procedural
methods such as ISO 9000 and supplier evaluation. Supply chain managers tend to
adopt more collaborative approaches such as supplier development, awards, and
complaint resolution processes. Trent et al. (
1999
) addresses the increasing impor-
tance of suppliers, particularly in supporting product and service quality require-
ments, and presents a series of questions concerning how well purchasing and
sourcing activities contribute to total quality. Robinson and Malhotra (
2005
) discuss
the parallels between quality management and supply chain management.
In all the above studies supplier quality management has been widely empha-
sized for quality management in supply chains. In this paper, we present a multi-
criteria decision making approach based on fuzzy TOPSIS for evaluating supplier
quality. The advantage of using fuzzy TOPSIS is that it distinguishes between
Bene
t (The more the better) and the Cost (The less the better) category criteria and
selects solutions that are close to the positive ideal solutions and far from negative
Search WWH ::
Custom Search