Outranking methods in support of supplier selection

Initial purchasing decisions such as make-or-buy decisions and supplier selection are decisions of strategic importance to companies. The nature of these decisions usually is complex and unstructured. Management Science techniques might be helpful tools for this kind of decision making problems. So far, however, the application of outranking methods in purchasing decisions has not been suggested in purchasing or operations research literature. In this paper we show by means of a supplier selection example, that an outranking approach may be very well suited as a decision-making tool for initial purchasing decisions.