The Evaluation and Selection of Outsourcing Suppliers in Mass Customization (MC)

Many MC companies find it necessary to cooperate with a large number of outsourcing suppliers to pro vide MC products according to customers' diversified orders. To this end,how to select competitve suppliers for the outsourcing manufacturing of non-core processes is the key to establish strong supply chain ally of MC company as well as make the company more efficient in its core manufacturing processes. A procedure of selecting outsourcing suppliers was presented to identify and find competitive suppliers. The continuous improvement of this procedure was proposed to ensure the optimal supply chain of MC company in the long run. Besides ,a multi-criteria evaluation model in the procedure was set up according to MC's characteristic with fuzzy multi-criteria methods combined to solve the fuzzy problems of criteria weight and qualitative attribute value. A case study of MC manufacturing company was provided to show that the procedure,model and methods are effective to select outsourcing suppliers.