AIDEA: a methodology for supplier evaluation and selection in a supplier-based manufacturing environment

Supplier evaluation and selection, an important element in supplier-based manufacturing and supply chain management has been gaining attention in both academic literature and industrial practice. In this paper, we presented a modified data envelopment analysis (DEA) method for supplier selection which can operate under conditions of imprecise information. A brief description of the importance of supplier evaluation and selection is given, followed by an overview of DEA, along with several extensions of DEA applied specifically to supplier evaluation and selection. Contributions of our proposed approach include the elimination of the poor discriminatory power and inability of traditional DEA to rank the efficient suppliers. In addition, our method can be used in situations with imprecise data.