The Application of Data Mining and BP Neural Network in Supplier Selection

For implementing supply chain management effectively, it is very important to select suppliers. So a supplier selection model which could evaluate the performance of suppliers was proposed based on rough sets and BP neural network from the perspective of knowledge discovery and data mining at first. Then, the calculation and analysis process of the model was given and discussed. The performance decision making table and discernable matrix were designed, and the BP neural network and BP algorithm were put forward. Finally, the model was applied into a practical example of manufacturing supplier performance evaluation. After the balanced scorecard index system was reduced and the reduction indexes were input to neural network for intelligent training, the evaluated sample was input to the trained network, the supplier performance evaluation value was gained. The evaluation result is consistent with the actual result. Thus, by use of this method, we can select the best supplier whose performance is the best.