Providing a structured methodology for supplier selection and evaluation for strategic outsourcing

Strategic outsourcing plays an important role in the success of supply chain management. Since some organisations outsource some important parts of their business, the consequences of poor decisions can cause big losses to their business. In this regard, many organisations have tried to identify, evaluate, and select suitable suppliers in order to establish a successful long-term cooperative relationship. Therefore, various models for the implementation of strategic outsourcing have been developed and used; these models have been often subjective and few of them are practically convenient to implement. Considering the limitations of strategic outsourcing models, in this article, a structured methodology for strategic outsourcing is provided, in which suppliers are first evaluated while considering operational criteria such as quality, cost, and delivery time by DEA model. Eventually, efficient companies in terms of strategic criteria and their strategic alliance with the organisation are evaluated and ranked using evidential reasoning (ER) algorithm. Finally, the best companies are selected as strategic suppliers for the organisation based on using the structured methodology. The presented methodology was used in a case study on a software provider company in Iran.