Supplier selection in resilient supply chains: a grey relational analysis approach

Suppliers can be considered as inevitable sources of external risks in modern supply chains. In this context, resilience that stands for the adaptive capability to respond to disruptions and recovering from it needs to be considered in supplier selection. But selection of suppliers is a challenging issue that involves the evaluation of both qualitative and quantitative attributes, in usual have imprecise and limited information. Grey relational analysis based on linguistic assessment of supplier rating and attribute weightings could judiciously be used under these situations to obtain a set of possibility values for prioritizing supplier selection. In this research, a supplier to be selected in the context of a resilient supply chain is termed as a resilient supplier. Taking electronic supply chain as a case study, with six alternative suppliers, grey possibility values for supplier selection were calculated and the suppliers were prioritized. Sensitivity analysis was also conducted to identify how far the selection priorities of suppliers change by varying the weightings given to each of the resilience attributes. This helps us in identifying the attributes of resilience where a particular supplier performs well. A comparison of proposed grey methodology with analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and analytic network process (ANP) was also conducted to comprehend extent of out-performance. The results of the proposed research could help top management in taking strategic level decision making with respect to selection of suppliers in a resilient supply chain.