Resilient Supplier Selection Problem with a New Hybrid Method: Application in Retail Industry

Suppliers have frequently been outlined as the main driver of risks in causing extremely high levels of supply chain disruptions. In recent years, researchers have been increasingly interested in the field of selection of resilient suppliers. The catastrophic impacts of COVID-19 on businesses have greatly influenced the selection of resilient suppliers in the supply chain. Being crucial to the distribution of consumer goods in society, Retail businesses are typically subjected to this disorder. This paper aims at proposing a hybrid approach to deal with the problem of resilient supplier assessment in a retail supply chain sector that is characterized by a large number of suppliers and frequent entry and exit of suppliers from the retailer's supplier portfolio, which have an impact on the sorting of suppliers using conventional MCDM methods. The proposed hybrid approach involves: (1) a new method to identify key resilient criteria for supplier selection in retail companies, (2) an ANP method to weight the resilient criteria and a factor analysis to identify the strategic resilient criteria, (3) a k-medoid clustering technique for improving the efficiency of multi-criteria decision-making process, and (4) a Vikor method to rank the clusters. A case study of a retail chain supplier selection is presented, and the proposed approach is applied using the real retail data. Results analysis reveals that our proposed approach enables the decision makers to identify and assess resilient suppliers more efficiently and effectively, where reversal ranking is omitted. We hope that our proposed approach will encourage supply chain managers to assess their suppliers’ resiliency in a simple and effective way.