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Outsourcing logistical activities have become a widely used approach for firms to avoid high fixed costs and heavy investment requirements and to achieve competitive advantages. Lean six sigma (LSS) has been accepted globally across sectors as a management strategy for achieving process excellence. The purpose of this paper is to feature the application of LSS for improving the supplier selection process (SSP) of outsourced logistics services in a multinational health-care company.

This study is based on an action research case study conducted on the SSP of the freight and distribution department in a multinational health-care company. This paper reports on the application of the LSS define-measure-analyze-improve-control (DMAIC) approach for reducing supplier selection lead time.

The study features a real-world case study of the LSS DMAIC application to improve the supplier selection process of a large health-care company. The key issues that were identified are lack of information visibility, top-down changes and unclear communication lines. To counteract these three root causes, the lean six sigma techniques that are implemented are the 5S, stakeholder analysis and standard operating procedure.

This research provided empirical evidence of how practical challenges in SSP can be managed with the use of LSS. It further proposed plausible solutions for reducing and sustaining improved outcomes. As the study is limited to one case, the validity of the results can be improved by including more organisations and more case studies from other similar organisations.

Research in supplier selection processes rarely links continuous improvement ideology such as LSS to support strategic selection and procurement of logistics services. This paper could serve as a resource for both practitioners to derive useful implications and to academicians as it contributes to the LSS body of knowledge for further theory testing.

The principal research objective entails examining the nexus between green supplier selection and green performance while scrutinizing the moderating role of governance mechanisms, specifically process control and outcome control, in shaping this association.

To assess our hypotheses, this study obtained data from Chinese manufacturing sectors and utilized regression analysis on a dataset consisting of 295 samples.

This study enriches the sustainable supply chain management literature by emphasizing the influence of green supplier selection on a firm’s green performance and the moderating effects of outcome and process control, offering practical insights for industry professionals.

This study enriches the sustainable supply chain management literature by emphasizing the influence of supplier selection on a firm’s environmental performance and the moderating effects of outcome and process control, offering practical insights for industry professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to verify if Brazilian companies are adopting environmental requirements in the supplier selection process. Further, this paper intends to analyze whether there is a relation between the level of environmental management maturity and the inclusion of environmental criteria in the companies' selection of suppliers.

A review of mainstream literature on environmental management, traditional criteria in the supplier selection process and the incorporation of environmental requirements in this context. The empirical study's strategy is based on five Brazilian case studies with industrial companies. Face‐to‐face interviews and informal conversations are to be held, explanations made by e‐mail with representatives from the purchasing, environmental management, logistics and other areas, and observation and the collection of company documents are also employed.

Based on the cases, it is concluded that companies still use traditional criteria to select suppliers, such as quality and cost, and do not adopt environmental requirements in the supplier selection process in a uniform manner. Evidence found shows that the level of environmental management maturity influences the depth with which companies adopt environmental criteria when selecting suppliers. Thus, a company with more advanced environmental management adopts more formal procedures for selecting environmentally appropriate suppliers than others.

This is the first known study to verify if Brazilian companies are adopting environmental requirements in the supplier selection process.

The purpose of this paper is to present three heuristics for choosing supplier selection criteria. By considering the balance between the expected relative effort and benefit of using different selection criteria, the heuristics suggest which criteria should be prioritized. The heuristics serve to develop our understanding of the search and evaluation heuristics used in supplier selection and to facilitate further research.

The research is primarily theoretical, yet draws on empirical studies of supplier selection. The theoretical basis is Simon’s notion of procedural rationality (Simon, 1976). The author makes the general notion of procedural rationality more concrete for supplier selection by formally describing three heuristics for choosing selection criteria. The heuristics share the same logic but differ in terms of the precision of the input information required from the purchaser. The paper provides illustrations of the heuristics.

It appears that procedural rationality can be specified for the process of designing the supplier selection process by explicitly recognizing the cost and value of selection criteria. There is no one way of doing this, but at the most basic level, it requires an ordinal ranking of criteria. Already such a rudimentary, qualitative, assessment can help identifying suitable criteria. The heuristics developed appear compatible with established approaches for the subsequent selection of suppliers.

The paper addresses the early stage of supplier selection which has been largely ignored in the literature.

The purpose of this paper is to change the traditional supplier selection methods by shifting the emphasis from using a single model to using multiple models in the unstructured decision‐making context and to provide a tool for decision makers to make informed decisions of supplier selection in the multiple perspectives.

There are various supplier selection models available in the literature. However, using the result of a single model as a basis for making the final decision could lead to a biased decision given the fact that any model has its limitations. The qualities of the decision‐making process and the decision itself increase by applying a multiple perspectives approach rather than a single model. The multiple perspectives decision‐making allows collaboration and knowledge sharing among the participants which leads to a less‐biased decision. This study examines commonly applied supplier selection models, formulates general perspectives of these models, and proposes a framework of multiple perspectives decision making for supplier selection. It further provides a structure of supplier selection system based on the proposed approach. Through a prototype of web portal, the study demonstrates the usefulness of the proposed multiple perspective system approach in the decision context of collaboration and knowledge sharing.

The general finding from this study is that the multiple perspectives approach to supplier selection enables the decision makers to actively participate and fully understand the decision‐making process through knowledge sharing which in turn ensures high quality of the final decisions.

Supplier selection decision makers can make more informed decisions through collaboration among all decision‐making participants in the multiple perspectives. It informs supply chain managers of the potentially positive effect of knowledge sharing on the decision‐making process in supplier selection.

Multiple perspectives decision making provides a novel approach that emphasizes on the knowledge sharing and collaboration between the experts, who are familiar with the supplier relations, and the decision makers who are responsible for the final decisions.

The nascent behavioral supply management (BSM) research stream has raised the level of attention given to deviations from the standard assumptions of the rational paradigm in economics. The adaptation of cognitive heuristics, which add vulnerability to judgment and decision making, creates a pressing need to identify and develop mitigation strategies to debias decision making in the supply chain management environment. The purpose of this paper is to investigate debiasing measures, corresponding contextual variables in the supplier selection process, and their implications for financial decision effectiveness.

The authors used a large‐scale empirical survey among 306 buyers to investigate the relationships among individual and organizational contextual factors, debiasing measures in the supplier selection decision, and the financial effectiveness of the supplier selection decision.

It was found that organizational and individual contextual factors have differing effects on the use of debiasing approaches in the supplier selection decision. Further, the debiasing tactics can have a positive (in the case of supplier selection task decomposing) or a negative (in the case of an interactional challenging of the supplier selection) impact on the financial effectiveness of the supplier selection decision. These findings suggest that supply managers must better understand the contextual factors that influence the supplier selection decision, and carefully choose the correct debiasing tactics when selecting suppliers.

This paper relaxes the economic assumption of rational actors and addresses the need to identify and use debiasing tactics in supply chain management contexts. The research also complements the broader‐based behavioral decision‐making literature, which has often relied upon experimental methodologies that use undergraduate or MBA students, by employing a survey‐based approach with supply managers as key informants.

The purpose of this paper is to create knowledge on the intuitive global sourcing process applied by small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) managers.

This study reports on qualitative inquiries with experienced sourcing managers from 10 SMEs in the textile industry. The study follows a three-step semi-structured interviewing process, allowing us to gradually unveil the detailed nature of the intuitive supplier selection process.

Nine of the 10 SMEs rely on a highly intuitive supplier selections process, where one supplier at a time is gradually taken into the exchange while testing the supplier’s behavior. The process consists of an early heuristics sub-process, which gradually switches over to a more advanced intuiting behavioral pattern-matching process.

Most OM/SCM research has treated global sourcing and supplier selection as a highly rational, analytical and deliberate optimization problem. This study uncovers a completely different, and frequently successful, intuitive process, which could inspire managers in companies of all sizes, faced with high uncertainty about global supplier selection decisions.

Intuition has recently been adopted in the global sourcing literature. However, this study is the first to offer detailed insights into a predominantly intuitive global sourcing process, specifically as it is managed by SMEs.

Service supplier selection is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem assuming a strategic role for the competitiveness of high-tech manufacturing companies. Nevertheless, especially for service quality evaluation, there is little empirical evidence of the practical usefulness of MCDM methodologies. Aiming to cover this gap between theoretical approaches and empirical applications, the purpose of this paper is to propose a fuzzy extended analytic hierarchy process (FEAHP) approach for service supplier evaluation.

A hybrid approach which combines some of the strengths of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and of the fuzzy set theory is presented, as organized into five steps. A case study is used to evaluate the applicability in a real company context.

The usability of the approach is demonstrated in an aerospace company for solving the supplier selection problem of a business software whose applications are still in infancy: a Test Data Management System (TDMS). The illustrative application contains both “general” criteria to be used for other service supplier selection contexts as well as service-specific criteria related to software selection.

Even if the application regards the selection of a software supplier, the methodology can be generically extended to other services’ selection in complex manufacturing industries through the personalization of some criteria.

Implications can be derived both for business managers involved into the decision-making process and for suppliers identifying the most promising features of software quality.

The originality consists in the combination into a hybrid approach of the strong points of the AHP with the fuzzy set; the inclusion of multiple perspectives of decision criteria for service supplier selection, basically the “software product” and “supplier” ones; a real empirical application to test and demonstrate the efficacy and the practical utility of the proposed approach.

The authors perform a large‐scale review of debiasing literature with the purpose of deriving a mutually exclusive and exhaustive debiasing taxonomy. This taxonomy is used to conceptualize debiasing activities in the supplier selection process. For each supplier selection‐debiasing construct, scale items are proposed.

A systematic classification approach was used to build a debiasing taxonomy, combined with a Q‐methodology.

Based on the developed and externally validated debiasing taxonomy, five debiasing activities for the supplier selection context are derived. The conceptual investigation of these supplier selection‐oriented debiasing measures helps both researchers and supply managers to gain a better understanding of debiasing mechanisms and to effectively further improve the supplier selection process by integrating behavioral aspects.

This research extends the taxonomy of decision biases developed by Carter, Kaufmann, and Michel, by systematically analyzing strategies to debias the decision‐making process. The highly fragmented research landscape on debiasing was inventoried and structured. As a result, a debiasing taxonomy was created that extracted five main debiasing categories. These were then conceptualized within the context of the supplier selection process. In doing so, debiasing literature from different research streams such as economics, psychology, and behavioral and strategic decision making was systematically integrated into the field of supply management. Proposed scale items allow for empirical investigation as a next step in the development of the nascent field of behavioral supply management.

Competitive international business environment has forced many firms to focus on supply chain management to cope with highly increasing competition. Hence, supplier selection process has gained importance recently, since most of the firms have been spending considerable amount of their revenues on purchasing. The supplier selection problem involves conflicting multiple criteria that are tangible and intangible. Hence, the purpose of this study is to propose an integrated model for supplier selection. In order to achieve this purpose, supplier selection problem has been structured as an integrated lexicographic goal programming (LGP) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP) model including both quantitative and qualitative conflicting factors. The application process has been accomplished in a food company established in Istanbul, Turkey. In this study, the model building, solution and application processes of the proposed integrated model for supplier selection have been presented.