Methods for supplier clustering

Abstract

One of the crucial points for supplier management is to assess the supplier's performance and capabilities. This helps to ensure that suppliers who are able to meet certain expectations are included in the active supplier pool. For supplier management, it may be important to distinguish between suppliers in the active supplier pool. In mathematical terms, this means that groups should be formed, whereby suppliers are grouped according to their performance and capabilities. We present and compare the application of partially ordered set (poset), tiered data envelopment analysis (TDEA) and cluster analysis on a numerical example of a supplier evaluation problem. The results show that the methods lead to similar results