A New Hybrid Model Based Decision Support System For Supplier Selection Process: A Case Study from Purchasing Department, UTP

Decision making process is a huge and crucial activity that must be given high attention by decision makers and managers as it affects all business strategies in organizations. Computer Based Decision Support System (DSS) is built and developed to assist decision makers in the activity of decision making process. DSS includes different components that integrate together out of which the most important part is the model based system. As a result of the rapidly increasing and sustainable needs of organizations, suppliers have become essential to any business. On the other hand, decision makers and managers face challenges when they are about to select suppliers due to the strong competitiveness among suppliers, obstacles that they will face when poor decisions are made, and many
other reasons. Evaluating and selecting suppliers has been considered as the most critical and important process among the whole purchasing processes. However most of the
existing models that have been proposed to support supplier selection decisions have various shortcomings. All the drawbacks of these models will be discussed during this
research in details which indicates the urgent need for new suitable model. This research intends to develop a new hybrid model base DSS for supplier selection process that can guarantee better decision making. The new proposed model provides a suitable tool for assisting decision makers and managers to make the right decisions and select the most suitable supplier. The proposed model depends upon linear weightage model and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach. The proposed hybrid model will be applied
using a real life case study to assess its effectiveness. In addition, What-if analysis technique will be used for model validation purpose. Finally, DSS software will be
developed to utilize the proposed model to assist supplier selection decisions.