Collaborative supplier selection on the Web

The supplier selection procedure is becoming more and more important for enterprises. To improve the efficiency of communication and collaboration among participants, a Web-based collaborative system is developed to facilitate, rather than to automate the supplier selection procedure. Two main facilities are provided in the system. The first one collects data from various managers and helps the enterprise to define the criteria and calculate the weights of criteria. The second helps a working team to evaluate the performance of all potential suppliers. Using the two facilities sequentially, the most suitable supplier(s) can be selected based on the measuring results, using a linear weighting model.