Multicriteria Decision-Making Framework for Supplier Selection: A Customer Community-Driven Approach

Supplier selection is the core of enterprise supply chain management. It involves a systematic evaluation of potential supply partners. Customer expectations for products and services are rarely considered when selecting suppliers. Considering customer factors in supplier selection faces many problems, including customer segmentation, importance ranking for customer requirements, and answering how customer requirements guide the supplier selection. For the above, a multicriteria supplier selection framework driven by customer communities is proposed. It includes three stages. In the first stage, a customer segmentation method is used to discover customer communities. In the second stage, the weighted interval rough number method quantitatively analyzes the customer requirements in each community, and then expert knowledge is integrated to determine the importance of supplier selection indicators. In the third stage, a genetic algorithm based on a stochastic tournament model is used to search for the optimal suppliers. A practical case study of a household refrigerator was conducted to illustrate the performance of our framework. A simulation experiment was designed to verify that our framework could update the supplier selection scheme according to changes in customer requirements in a dynamic scenario.