Abstract

Supplier sorting after an evaluation process in many organizations is a routine task required by a quality assurance program or as a Supply Chain Management (SCM) regular practice in order to ensure service and efficiency, two main objectives of SCM. By using a fuzzy multicriteria over-ranking method, it is possible to create automated reasoning systems for dealing with high volume of data in a timely manner. The contribution of this paper is to show an actual industrial application solved with a new method derived from the classical Promethee (R) approach. The problem deals with assigning a category to the supplier which is different from the well-known problem of supplier ranking very abundant in the literature. The method uses Flowsort (R) algorithm for classifying providers into categories. The categories are in order to decide the outcome of a Logistics Service Provider; that is, to continue being a partner until a new appraisal exercise, to continue but with correcting measures, or to be dismissed due to low performance. An example of the application is developed for a major supplier of mining operations in Chile and directions for other uses of the method are given. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.