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.