Supplier Selection using combined MCDM Approach - A Case Study for Mobile selection

Purchasing management is most essential in today's running world, because the profit potential of effective management of the purchasing and supply activities is enormous compared with other practical management alternatives. One of the most critical way is the selection of the right supplier. A Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) techniques namely Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS), Fuzzy TOPSIS, Vlse Kriterijumska Optimizacija Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) and Linear Programming (LP) are effectively applied in the supplier selection process.

Entropy is the measure of the disorder degree of the system, and it can also measure the effective information provided by the data. Therefore, the entropy can be used to determine the weights. ENTROPY method is used to calculate the weight and give suppliers a ranking; LP effectively allocates order quantity to each vendor. The alternatives are ranked and compared in order to arrive at an efficient result. This approach is demonstrated with a real world case study involving four main evaluation criteria and the firm has to determine the most appropriate and beneficial suppliers, which results in the great savings in both costs and man hours.