A fuzzy evaluation approach for partnership selection on the supply chain

For years, researchers and practitioners have primarily investigated the various processes and models on supply chain management. Recently, however, there has been increasing attention placed on partnership selection, which represents a new way of managing the business and relationships with other partners on supply chain. Because of the uncertainty of market, it is not always easy for the decision-maker(s) in business to select a proper partner or partners. In this paper, a new fuzzy AHP (analytic hierarchy process) model is proposed to deal with the partnership selection problem, combined with the basic fuzzy set theory. In a sense, it means that the consistent degree of judgments or opinions could be provided by different experts in the process of partnership selection, which is enable for managers to obtain fair and reasonable conclusions. A practical case in Chinese company is introduced and the effectiveness of partnership selection by the proposed method is illustrated on the basis of this model.