Supplier Development Using Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM)

Business outsourcing is one of the top business trends today. Organisations concentrate more on core business activities and outsource the non-core activities to the third party service providers. Organisations around the world are being forced to change the nature of their business to use their resources effectively to sustain the competitive advantage. Since customer expectations demand high quality products at lower cost and shorter delivery time, manufacturing firms desperately seek cooperation from their suppliers to improve their business performance. It is proven that such collaborative business operations results in optimum success with significant cost saving. Supplier development or the process of working jointly with the suppliers has enabled many firms to improve and expand their capabilities. The research reported in this book examines the identification of the criteria for supplier development. Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) based model has been proposed to identify criterions for supplier development to aid the decision makers with more realistic solutions to the problems that encounter during the supplier development process.