Considering Strategic Operational Objectives to Solve a Supplier Selection Problem of a Food Company

ABSTRACT In an uncertain and competitive world, operational activities need to be aligned with company strategies. In terms of supply chain management, several strategies have been discussed in the literature to improve the performance of a company. In this context, this study presents a supplier selection problem in the context of strategic operations. The study considers classical objectives of manufacturing strategy to support the supplier selection problem for a food company. The study contributes to the literature by discussing and illustrating the use of Decision Support Systems (DSS) to support strategic Multi‐Criteria Decision Making/Aiding problems. The novelty of the study is that it considers the strategic operations objectives in a real supplier selection problem. Hence, five real suppliers are considered and are evaluated against seven criteria, namely: Price, Freight, Accuracy, Quality, Flexibility, Lead Time, and Promptness, to attend to strategic operations. The FITradeoff Decision Support System (DSS) is applied to solve this problem. The DSS presents both paradigms for preference modelling i.e., elicitation by decomposition and holistic evaluation. These give more flexibility to Decision‐Makers. Therefore, this study focusses on illustrating the use of this DSS to support a supplier selection process from the strategic operations perspective.