A Fuzzy AHP approach for selecting a global supplier in pharmaceutical industry

Abstract

Our study looks into the strategy that should be pursued for raw material procurement by a pharmaceutical firm operating in Turkey. In this paper, pharmaceutical research companies and food industry chemists operating in the global market in the pharmaceutical industry are examined and a suitable supply strategy is suggested for a company operating in Turkey under the specified criteria. The supplier selection is a multi-criterion problem which includes both qualitative and quantitative criteria. This paper proposes a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (fuzzy-AHP) to efficiently tackle both quantitative and qualitative criteria involved in selection of global supplier in pharmaceutical industry. Four main criteria and thirteen sub-criteria were identified for supplier selection in this problem. The number of suppliers to be selected under these criteria was identified as four. A numerical example presented illustrates the different selection criteria to select the best supplier in pharmaceutical industry.