Supply Chain Configuration: Comparison of supplier evaluation attempts

Existing attempts to classify suppliers, purchasing parts and material flows mainly focus on financial criteria. The result is a mismatch between those suppliers/material flows identified as relevant under current business conditions and those suppliers/material flows that truly have major impacts on logistically relevant drivers. The objective of this paper is to compare suppliers identified as relevant based on an ABC-analysis and on the outcome of a developed, applied and case-tested decision model that considers especially logistically relevant input factors such as the suppliers’ geographical position, their influence on the handling of product variants or uncertainty considerations. The decision model developed as well as an ABC-analysis is applied within a multiple case study in the agricultural industry. The validation approach includes an adapted version of the pattern-matching-technique and statistical means (in particular hit-rates). The comparison of the results of the two supplier evaluation attempts shows that the developed decision model can be an appropriate supplement to an ABC-analysis. An appropriate supplement as several suppliers identified based on logistically relevant drivers are not identified applying ABC-analysis only.