A decision-support framework for agile enterprise partnering.

Abstract

Being an essential part of an agile supply-chain management and focusing on selecting business partners, agile enterprise partnering is regarded as a key activity that can make a significant contribution to the development of a successful supply chain. This paper proposes a decision-support framework for the evaluation and selection of business partners in order to help the industry form agile supply chains. Based on literature review and empirical studies, the proposed framework organizes 32 agility criteria into ten decision domains according to their inherent characteristics. The identified criteria and decision domains form a hierarchy that acts as an agile partner-assessment model. In order to provide empirical evidence for the proposed model, a case study is conducted. Using the data collected from site visits and interviews, the weight values of decision domains and criteria are determined via a pairwise comparison method. Considering the incomplete and vague nature of the collected data, an evidential reasoning and synthesis approach is employed to conduct multi-criteria and multi-level synthesis. The advantages of the proposed methodology and methods are demonstrated by the case study results.