Abstract

The vendor selection process refers to a sourcing decision and it is one of the strategic decisions that is used by enterprises to reduce costs and improve their performance. Traditionally, vendors are normally selected on the basis of traditional criteria, such as costs and quality, neglecting other important factors, for example, resilience criteria (e.g., agility and flexibility) that has been increasingly becoming paramount to sustain the service. This work proposes a user-friendly decision-making tool for selecting the best vendor from a potential pool of companies that submitted their tenders for the implementation of the proposed radio frequency identification (RFID)-based passport tracking system. The traditional and resilience selection criteria were used in a unified framework in collaboration with experts in the institution. Next, a decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) algorithm is proposed to determine the relative importance of each criterion and the weights obtained were integrated into the ELimination Et Choix Traduisant la REalité (ELECTRE) algorithm to evaluate the performance of vendors and to select the best one. The efficiency of the proposed tool was proved from the real case study of 6 tenders submitted for implementing a RFID-based passport tracking system