Vendor consolidation for a small appliance company

Abstract

Vendor consolidation is becoming an important management focus in recent years due to the need to sharpen cost performance to increase competition in the fast changing business environment. Vendor consolidation can assist company to streamline its operation, concentrate buying power and reduce purchase price and transaction cost. This paper proposed an intelligent vendor consolidation support system (VCSS) by integrating Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP), Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to rank vendors according to the predefined elimination criteria and the performance of individual vendors in each area of the criteria. With this ranking of vendors, the vendors with inferior performance will be isolated and eliminated to achieve the target number of vendors.