Abstract

Supplier selection is one of the strategic issues that companies face, and it has a significant impact on their financials, reputation, and performance. This decision is such big that its influence may remain for years. It is not easy for big companies with vast product lines to frequently switch from one supplier to another. The contracts are such detailed and have different aspects that make changing a supplier rapidly impossible. In addition, the process of changing a supplier is cumbersome and costly. All these, make this decision vital and unbelievably sensitive, and essential for the vast companies.

The automotive industry’s supply chains are considered as one the most complicated chains among different sectors. Although there are common aspects in automotive industries and other businesses, the nature of this industry and its associated businesses can be distinct in many ways, making this industry an exciting topic of research. These characteristics could show the importance of the automotive industry in general and spare parts aftermarket in particular—these characteristics of the automotive industry vary in different regions and under different circumstances. Therefore, we face unalike situations and conditions in different countries. The market behavior and features are different. Thus, the managers’ needs and attitudes would be different as well.

Therefore, I decided to conduct this research on the Canadian automotive aftermarket business to understand the needs and attitudes of the executives and customers of a considerable proportion of this market. I create three different supplier selection models based on the requirements of this market. The applied methods are AHP, fuzzy-AHP, and TOPSIS. Eventually, I compared the results and provided suggestions for the executives.

I have three alternatives in this project, one of which should be selected as the ultimate supplier. We used three methods: AHP, Fuzzy-AHP, and TOPSIS, for model creation and comparing the results. To gather data on the weights of criteria, I executed two surveys with two different targeted participants. Also, a group of experts formed the decision-making committee for alternatives pairwise comparison. Service was determined as the most critical criterion following by the product criterion. The selected alternative has highly qualified products, very competitive pricing, and more flexibility than its competitors. Analyzing the model's results, I provided suggestions for the selected alternative to increase the score difference with other alternatives and become a more suitable selected supplier.