A hybrid technique for partner selection in virtual enterprises

Abstract

Globally, businesses are increasingly depending on other businesses’ competencies to meet the increasing demands from customers. Enterprises collaborate with a view of sharing their expertise, costs and risks. Many studies have examined this subject with only a few proposing techniques that can facilitate decision-makers’ abilities to filter out inefficient partners among the many that show interest to be part of the consortium, prior to the selection process. Also, few techniques are available that can aid the selection process when the selection criteria are voluminous and uncertain in nature. Research dealing with this subject focusing on the construction industry is hardly available. A Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process-Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (FAHP-TOPSIS) technique, a hybrid of FAHP and F-TOPSIS, is designed to address this problem. This technique is embedded to Data Envelopment Analysis used to filter out inefficient partners at initial stages. FAHP determines decision criteria weights, while FTOPSIS evaluates the unfiltered partners. A comparison analysis of FAHP-TOPSIS with FAHP and F-TOPSIS in the same case, show similar results confirming their robustness. However, FAHP-TOPSIS gives the most consistent outcomes. It is proposed that FAHP-TOPSIS can be used on a wide range of partner selection decision problems.