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The process of the selection of a supplier has to deal with multiple responsibilities regardless of the sphere or industry. The selection of the supplier is connected with various risks and benefits among which there can be the reputation of a business among the consumers and partners, the satisfaction of the stakeholders, the efficiency of the processes and operations, and the profitability of the company. That is why the suppliers are to be selected thoroughly and thoughtfully. The industry selected for this paper is hospitality and food industry. A choice of salmon suppliers for a restaurant will be evaluated in this paper.
First of all, discussing the possible choice of a supplier for a restaurant or a chain of cafes it is important to remember the mission and vision of this particular business. The current global trends in food and diet choices have been heading towards sustainability for the last several years. This tendency is explained by the fact that the main target consumers of the contemporary restaurants are the Millenials who grew up under the influence of the promotion of the environmental responsibility. That way, to stay in demand, the contemporary restaurants and cafes are to provide the customers with sustainable meals. In other words, the sustainability and the quality of the salmon sold by the suppliers would be one of the main criteria.
As mentioned by Kerzner (2009), the supplier’s confidence concerning their ability to meet the deadline and provide the products in time is another vital criterion responsible for the efficiency of the operations and the presence of the required items in the restaurant’s menu for the satisfaction of the customers. In addition, the size and type of the business has to be taken into consideration by the decision makers since a restaurant caring about serving the sustainable products would be more inclined to cooperate with the responsible seafood artisans instead of buying from large farms that cause enormous pollutions annually. Moreover, as pointed out by Zsidisin and Ritchie (2008), the survey conducted by the Michigan State University shows that price is one of the most frequently emphasized characteristics of the suppliers within the food industry. Finally, one more important criterion to take into account is the location of the supplier. This characteristic would include the geographical information about the place where the supplier operates, its distance from the receiver of the goods, and its status (local or foreign).
Having established the five criteria (time, price, business type and size, sustainability and quality, location), one needs to assign the value to each of the characteristics. On the scale from one to ten the meanings are the following: time – 10 points, price – 9 points, business type and size – 5 points, sustainability and quality – 10 points, and location – 7 points.
After the calculations, the results of the three potential suppliers are the following: Supplier # 1 – 326 points, Supplier # 2 – 347 points, Supplier # 3 – 329 points. These scores determine the leader (Supplier # 2) with the highest score. Interestingly, taking a look at the scores of this supplier one will notice that they are not the candidate with the best time and price scores, so this supplier is going to be slow or unreliable and pricey, but their quality and sustainability score is higher than that of the other competitors.
The method applied to the supplier selection is beneficial since it provides an easy way to calculate the optimal candidate. It looks like a simple solution, but this is just an illusion as this approach has a couple of disadvantages. First of all, it might be rather challenging to assign a numerical value to each of the criteria on the list using the same scale. Converting a price (in dollars) and time (in days and hours) into the numbers from one to ten might turn out very confusing. Besides, how is one supposed to decide which aspects are more and which ones are less valuable? This solution might turn out rather arbitrary and cause multiple arguments among the decision makers. Finally, the final results may be slightly frustrating because the candidates’ lower scores on the important criteria can be easily compensated by the higher scores on the markers with a lower value.
In conclusion, the method of supplier selection tested in this paper can be rather helpful, yet it might make sense to employ it as an additional source of information for the decision makers who would rely on other methods as well. Applying mathematical calculations as the core method for the selection of suppliers seems insufficient as it is mainly based on fuzzy logic and approximations (Golinska & Kawa, 2015).
Reference List
Golińska, P., & Kawa, A. (2015). Technology management for sustainable production and logistics. New York, NY: Springer.
Kerzner, H. (2009) Project management: A systems approach to planning, scheduling, and controlling (10th ed.). New York, NY: Wiley.
Zsidisin, G., & Ritchie, B. (2008). Supply chain risk. New York, NY: Springer.
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