Development of decision support system for e-supplier selection in Indian mechanical manufacturing industry using distance based approximation

This paper proposes a framework to develop a deterministic model for the valuation, selection and grading (ranking) of e-suppliers by using Modified Distance Based Approach (MDBA), which has not been used earlier in e-supplier selection. The e-supplier selection system performs a major part for the successful running of any supply chain. Thus, for effective running of any supply chain, it is necessary to build a system for the selection of e-supplier. Building such a decision support system software is important for the development of any decision support system efficiently with reduced cost, time and effort. The current research is based on 8 criteria and 52 sub-criteria by giving equal weightage to all of them. In this study, the major criteria are disintegrated into small sub-criteria. To validate the results obtained through the proposed distance based approximation method, the results are compared with other methodologies. Finally, with the illustration of the example problem, the applicability of the developed model is described.