ORIGINAL ARTICLE A fuzzy hybrid group decision support system approach for the supplier evaluation process Seyed Mohammad Hashemian & Majid Behzadian & Reza Samizadeh & Joshua Ignatius Received: 12 March 2012 /Accepted: 7 April 2014 /Published online: 13 May 2014 # Springer-Verlag London 2014 Abstract The quality and delivery performance of a typical company depends largely on the capability of its suppliers. It is therefore important for a company to evaluate the perfor- mance of its existing suppliers. However, the problem of supplier evaluation is rather complex when a group of deci- sion makers responsible for these suppliers are geographically dispersed. Evaluating decisions requiring the elicitation of vague and imprecise linguistic information expressed in fuzzy terms. For this purpose, a hybrid fuzzy group decision-making approach for supplier evaluation is proposed, integrating the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (F-AHP) and the fuzzy preference-ranking-organization-method-for-enrichment-of- evaluation (PROMETHEE) group decision support system (F-PROMETHEE GDSS) method. F-AHP is used to deter- mine the weight of multiple criteria while F-PROMETHEE GDSS is applied for the final ranking of suppliers from a group decision viewpoint. The approach advances the supplier evaluation context in two aspects. First, it treats each decision maker uniquely in terms of the preference function and thresh- old levels. Second, it provides rapid communication between teams through video conferencing. The hybrid approach is used to evaluate the suppliers of a dairy company. Keywords Supplier evaluation . Fuzzy AHP . Fuzzy PROMETHEE GDSS 1 Introduction In a global operating environment, leading companies require a broad visualization of the supply chain management (SCM) issues without sacrificing the details that enhances customer demands. This is often aided by the advances in communica- tion and information systems that enable the systematic eval- uation across the entities within the supply chain. SCM can also be defined as the integration and management of supply chain activities through cooperative organizational relation- ships, effective business processes, and high levels of infor- mation sharing to create high-performing value systems for a sustainable competitive advantage [31]. One of the key issues underpinning the success or failure of SCM is the supplier evaluation and selection system [15, 22, 24, 28, 37, 50, 52]. Significant reduction in acquisition costs without reducing the overall quality of the product or services delivered would directly affect the overall corporate compet- itiveness of a firm. This makes supplier selection a major factor in the discipline of production and logistics manage- ment across a wide range of industrial sectors. In most practical-decision problems in supplier selection, the evaluation of alternatives is a typical multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem [16, 23, 35]. The litera- ture contains a large number of studies on MCDM techniques for the supplier selection problem, especially those that incor- porate the subjectivity of the decision makers (DMs) in the modeling framework. Among these methods, the most popu- lar ones are analytic hierarchy process (AHP), analytic S. M. Hashemian Department of Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Graduate Studies, Islamic Azad University-South Tehran Branch, Tehran, Iran M. Behzadian (*) Industrial Engineering Department, MehrAlborz University, Tehran, Iran e-mail: behzadian@mehralborz.ac.ir R. Samizadeh Department of Industrial Engineering, Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran e-mail: Rsamizadeh@alzahra.ac.ir J. Ignatius School of Mathematical Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia Int J Adv Manuf Technol (2014) 73:1105–1117 DOI 10.1007/s00170-014-5843-2