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Very often, manufacturing companies have been faced with the problem of assessment and selection of suppliers for their product development. Some methods and techniques have been developed to assist these companies in performing the assessment. However, these methods and techniques lack tge capability to deal with the instrumental and conceptual uncertainties that are involved in the supplier assessment and selection. Fuzzy expert system is an alternative approach from which the heuristics and knowledge of supplier assessment can be captured and the impreciseness and uncertainties due to the human subjectivity, that are common in the process of the supplier assessment, can be handled. In this paper, a combined scoring method with fuzzy expert systems approach is introduced to perform the supplier assessment. With the use of the fuzzy concept, the error due to human judgement in the scoring method could be minimized. First, current methods and techniques of supplier assessment are reviewed in this paper. There follows the description of a case study of combined scoring method and fuzzy expert systems approach to supplier assessment. Some results of the prototype system trial‐run are discussed in the final part of this paper.

This research aims to develop a supplier risk assessment methodology for measuring, tracking, and analyzing supplier and part specific risk over time for an automotive manufacturer.

Supply chain risk literature is analyzed and used in conjunction with interviews from the automotive manufacturer to identify risks in the supply base. These risks are incorporated into the development of a temporal risk assessment and monitoring system.

A framework of risk factors important to the auto manufacturer is presented. A multi‐criteria scoring procedure is developed to calculate part and supplier risk indices. These indices are used in the development of a risk assessment and monitoring system that allows the indices to be tracked over time to identify trends towards higher risk levels.

There are a number of operational issues identified in the paper that could be investigated in future research. One such issue is the development of alternative risk assessment methods that would increase the sensitivity of the risk analysis.

The framework is implementable in firms interested in understanding and controlling risk in their supply base. The research stems from an industry project with an automotive manufacturer. The method is designed to be practical and easy to implement and maintain. The system also has a visual reporting mechanism designed to provide early warning signals for potential problems in the supply base and to show temporal changes in risk.

This paper presents a dynamic risk analysis methodology that analyzes and monitors supplier risk levels over time.

Literature proposes that implementing supplier assessment and supplier collaboration simultaneously may lead to better sustainable performance. The purpose of this paper is to empirically examine the proposition by considering the contingent effects of two contextual factors, the environmental dynamism and the stakeholder pressure on sustainability.

Four configurations of governance mechanisms are identified according to the different levels of implementing supplier assessment and supplier collaboration. The performances of the four configurations are compared against the levels of environmental dynamism and stakeholder pressure. The empirical data from the sixth round of International Manufacturing Strategy Survey (IMSS) are used.

This paper found that the governance configuration with the highest level of implementing both governance mechanisms leads to the best performance. The synergistic effect that supplier assessment and collaboration complement each other to achieve better performance is verified. However, the synergistic effect holds robust only when the environmental dynamism and stakeholder pressure are high. The synergistic effect vanishes in the social and environmental performance when the environmental dynamism is low. The effect also vanishes in the environmental performance when the stakeholder pressure is low. No synergistic effect was found in business performance.

This paper reveals the complementarity between supplier assessment and supplier collaboration when they are implemented at a reasonably high level. It also reveals the importance of the fit of governance mechanisms under different external contexts. The results contribute to reconciling the disputes about the effectiveness of governing supplier relationship to achieve the sustainability along a supply chain.

The discussion of supplier performance assessment and implementation challenges has been evidenced well in the academic literature. However, the analysis of supplier performance assessment has been limited in terms of inclusion of suppliers’ perspective, especially in terms of what key performance indicators they deem to be relevant and aligned with their goals. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to shed light on supplier performance assessment, taking into account both manufacturing company’s and suppliers’ perspective, to evaluate to what extent the utilised performance measures are beneficial to all parties.

Based on literature review on supplier performance assessment, ten categories of performance measures were established and explored in a case study involving a UK manufacturing company and its suppliers. A questionnaire was distributed to the manufacturing company and their 30 suppliers, resulting with a total of 41 responses.

From the established ten categories only five categories were highly rated which were: net profits, flexibility and responsiveness, delivery performance and time and cycle time, product quality and availability, which were aligned to financial and internal business process categories.

This study focused on a UK-based company and its relationship with its suppliers and how performance measures were assessed within this context. A further study needs to be conducted in terms of comparing the results of the study to other companies’ supplier performance assessment.

The research on the topic of supplier performance assessment often relates to measurement and highlights measures for assessing suppliers’ performance to a particular industry or area of performance measurement. Hence, this study embeds three distinctive angles including the academic literature on supplier performance assessment, suppliers’ and the manufacturing company’s perspectives.

Purchasing organizations are exposed to risk in their interactions with suppliers, whether it is recognized and managed, addressed in a cursory manner, or altogether ignored. In order to understand the supply risk that exists, purchasing organizations can proactively assess the probability and impact of supply risk in advance, or reactively discover risk after a detrimental event occurs. The purpose of this study is to explore, analyze, and derive common themes on supply risk assessment techniques. Findings from this research indicate that purchasing organizations can assess supply risk with techniques that focus on addressing supplier quality issues, improving supplier processes, and reducing the likelihood of supply disruptions. From an agency theory perspective, these risk assessment techniques facilitate the obtaining of information by purchasing organizations to verify supplier behaviors, promoting goal congruence between buying and selling firms, and reducing outcome uncertainty associated with inbound supply.

This paper seeks to describe the development of a web‐based system for managing and assessing suppliers, presenting the system design and interface of the prototype and discussing the applicability of the system.

In this paper critical assessment criteria and factors for managing supplier quality (MSQ) were identified through literature review and a mail survey of manufacturers in Hong Kong. Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process methodology, a self‐assessment model comprising these criteria and factors was developed. Industry experts were invited to determine the relative weighting of these criteria and factors. A software was developed to support the assessment system.

The findings in this paper identified criteria addressed strategic alliance, supplier development and supplier monitoring. The critical factors encompassed buyer‐supplier partnership, technology and information sharing, sourcing strategies, supplier evaluation and motivation, and issues on performance measurement and improvement. A self‐assessment model comprising these criteria and factors was developed.

The paper shows that in future work, more best practices of supplier management will be identified to enrich the knowledge base of the system in order to further develop the assessment system to an expert system.

The findings in this paper were incorporated to develop a prototype web‐based system for self‐assessment with promising industrial validation results.

In this paper, a novel self‐assessment system was developed for supplier quality management. It is of great value for quality management theory and practice.

Using a sample of executing agency executives, donor agency executives and supplying organisation executives, this study aims to identify the critical criteria for the assessment of suppliers in foreign-aid funded procurement in Bangladesh.

An instrument with 32-seven-point (1 – rarely, 7 – mostly) Likert-scaled items was employed to gather data on the level of importance assigned by both buyers and suppliers on each supplier assessment criterion. The importance-performance matrix analysis was conducted to assess the gap in expectations between buyers and suppliers and to organise the assessment criteria into four categories such as “low priority”, “possible killer”, “concentrate here”, and “keep up the good work”.

The results indicate that, to provide better service, suppliers must assign tasks to the knowledgeable sales personnel, provide better warranties with well-known branded products, and ensure a reliable level of quality. The supplier organisations should implement a high calibre management system that allows prompt responses to enquiries and the provision of services without buyers having to follow up.

With careful considerations, the methodology and results of the study could be adapted to design supplier assessment procedure in other developing countries.

This research employs a simple and practical method which purchasing executives will find easy to apply and interpret the findings.

Purchasing organizations use various strategies and techniques to minimize the chance and impact of detrimental events occurring in the supply base. Supply risk assessments are a necessary first step in managing those risks. An analysis of in‐depth interviews with purchasing professionals from nine companies indicates that purchasing organizations often create contingency plans, and implement process‐improvement and buffer strategies in response to perceived supply risks discovered in assessments. Even though risk assessments, contingency plans, and risk management efforts are generally acknowledged as being important, many of those interviewed believed that there was not enough done in their organizations to mitigate supply‐related risks.

This paper describes an exploratory research effort to analyze and classify emerging operations management practices in US manufacturing. Using a survey of senior materials and operations management professionals in the United States, this study investigates manufacturers' supplier assessment practices, new product design and development practices, just‐in‐time practices, and quality practices. This study also identifies practices that share common variance‐covariance characteristics and to what extent the observed practices are linked to their underlying factors by means of exploratory factor analysis. Finally, bivariate correlation analysis is used to examine the relationships of the factors.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between buyer's emotional intelligence and buyer's relationship performance.

A survey methodology was used to collect data for this study. The survey was administered using an assessment process which incorporated “buyers'” and “suppliers'” assessment for the independent variable, emotional intelligence, and the dependent variable, relationship performance. The respondents consisted of 34 buyers and 102 suppliers.

Correlation and regression analysis revealed several significant relationships between the variables. Specifically, buyers' self‐assessed emotional intelligence was not significantly related to buyers' self‐assessed relationship performance. Buyers' emotional intelligence assessed by suppliers was significantly related to buyers' relationship performance assessed by suppliers. Buyers' emotional intelligence (as assessed by buyers and suppliers' assessment differences) was not significantly related to buyers' self‐assessed relationship performance. Last, buyers' emotional intelligence (as assessed by buyers' and suppliers' assessment differences) was significantly related to buyers' relationship performance (as assessed by buyers' and suppliers' assessment differences). Thus, the results suggest that buyers' emotional intelligence is positively related to relationship performance, most significantly from the perspective of their key suppliers.

This study is the first to introduce emotional intelligence within an environment that consisted of individuals working with others outside of their respective organizations (buyers and suppliers). This research offers some insight to buyers on the implications of emotional intelligence and how it can be used to support their interactions with their key suppliers.