Abstract
Supply chain management (SCM) is an attractive area for research which has seen tremendous growth in the past decades. From the literature we observe that, supplier outsourcing (SO) is a highly explored research field in SCM which lacks significant scientific contribution. The major concern in SO is the decision makers’ (DMs) viewpoint which are often vague and imprecise. To better handle such imprecision, in this paper, we propose a new two-stage decision-making framework called TSDMF, which uses hesitant fuzzy information as input. In the first stage, the DMs’ preferences are aggregated using a newly proposed simple hesitant fuzzy-weighted geometry operator, which uses hesitant fuzzy weights for better understanding the importance of each DM. Following this, in the second stage, criteria weights are estimated using newly proposed hesitant fuzzy statistical variance method and finally, a new ranking method called three-way hesitant fuzzy VIKOR (TWHFV) is proposed by extending the VIKOR ranking method to hesitant fuzzy environment. This ranking method uses three categories viz., cost, benefit and neutral along with Euclid distance for its formulation. The practicality of the proposed TSDMF is verified by demonstrating a supplier outsourcing example in an automobile factory. The robustness of TWHFV is realized by using sensitivity analysis and other strengths of TSDMF are discussed by comparison with another framework.
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Acknowledgements
We the authors thank the funding agency, University Grants Commission (UGC) for their financial support through Rajiv Gandhi National Fellowship (RGNF) scheme under the award number: F./2015-17/RGNF-2015-17-TAM-83. We also thank the Department of Science and Technology (DST), India for their financial aid in setting up a cloud environment under the FIST programme (Award Number: SR/FST/ETI-349/2013). We also express our heartfelt thanks to SASTRA University for offering us an excellent infrastructure to carry out our research work. Finally, we express our sincere thanks to the editor and to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.
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Appendix
Appendix
Let us analyze the five criteria taken for the purpose of evaluation. For choosing a suitable supplier, the committee decides 5 criteria, of which, two criteria belong to cost zone and 3 criteria belong to benefit zone. The details of these criteria are given below:
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On-time delivery rate \( \left( {C_{1} } \right) \): This defines the rate of delivery of the product on-time. This criterion must be maximized for better selection and hence, it belongs to the benefit zone.
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Cost \( \left( {C_{2} } \right) \): This defines the total cost incurred by each of the supplier. They include, product cost, freight cost and tarrif. Supplier with minimum cost is preferred more. Hence, it is placed in cost zone.
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Service \( \left( {C_{3} } \right) \): This defines the technical ability and managerial strength of the supplier. Preference is more for a supplier with maximum service rate. Hence, it belongs to benefit zone.
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Supplier profile \( \left( {C_{4} } \right) \): This defines the previous success stories, relationship ties with the organization, popularity of the supplier, risk involved (which is learned from previous history) etc. Clearly, this attribute poses a confusion to the DMs and hence, we recommend placing this attribute in the neutral zone. When the method by Liao and Xu (2013) is adopted, we place this attribute in the benefit zone.
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Quality \( \left( {C_{5} } \right) \): This defines the product reach and the market stability of the product from a particular supplier. This must be maximum for a supplier and so, it is placed in the benefit zone.
Let us now consider the abbreviation(s) and its expansion for easy understanding of the paper by using Table 11.
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Krishankumar, R., Ravichandran, K.S., Murthy, K.K. et al. A scientific decision-making framework for supplier outsourcing using hesitant fuzzy information. Soft Comput 22, 7445–7461 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-018-3346-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-018-3346-z