Supplier Selection Using Multi-Objective Optimization Based on Ratio Analysis (MOORA)

In the present era of globalisation, every organisation strives hard to sustain in the market by maintaining quality product or service up to customer satisfaction. Maintaining the quality of product or service depends on many factors such as demand fulfilment, timely delivery, customer relations, meeting customer obligations and so on. Production and service industries depend on many suppliers for either raw materials or outsourcing some of the semi-finished products to meet the timely demand. Selection of a good reliable supplier is of prime importance for manufacturing of quality product and eventually the brand value of the organisation. An incorrectly selected supplier for an organisation may stand in the way of achieving the goal of the organisation. The correct choice of the available supplier is critical to the success and competitiveness of the manufacturing organisation. Most of the supplier selection problems have been attended by many earlier researchers by employing various mathematical tools and techniques affected by the weights assigned to the considered selection criteria, and also by normalisation procedure adopted to make the elements of decision matrix comparable. Therefore, present situation demands for the need of a supplier selection method that would be unaffected by the weights and normalisation procedure. Here, an attempt has been made to apply multi-objective optimization on the basis of ratio analysis by assigning weights (Weighted MOORA) method for solving some of the common supplier selection problems. The method is also tested for the considered problem by taking a case study. It is observed that the method is very simple to understand and easy to implement. It provides almost exact ranking to the supplier alternatives as addition of weights gives a chance to prioritise amongst the criteria for selection.