Supplier Evaluation System in the Food Industry

Abstract: Evaluating suppliers is something that the majority of companies has to do and is something that often is a complex problem with many parameters and variables involved. This is especially true for a company like Kiviks Musteri that purchases a variety of different products from all over the world from different types of suppliers that come from different cultures and backgrounds. It is also essential that the suppliers and purchased goods meet demands in a vast amount of different areas including sustainability, food safety, origin and quality to name a few. This thesis has been conducted in collaboration with Kiviks Musteri, hereafter referred to as The Company (TC). This thesis has looked into TC's current supplier evaluation process and has analysed both how this process can be improved, and how this process can be integrated into a new supplier evaluation IT-system. This has been done by conducting a case study on The Company to thoroughly analyse their current situation and process, and comparing this to a comprehensive literature review of different areas within supplier evaluation. This case study showed that the current evaluation process was inadequate in several ways, especially regarding how the attributes and performance measures are designed and constructed in regards to evaluating and assigning scores to the suppliers. This led to a new suggested model being constructed with new attributes, scoring scales, attribute weights and quantification of previously purely qualitative attributes and performance measures. In relation to this a model for supplier monitoring and product control has also been constructed using game theory and Nash equilibrium. This suggested process has also been incorporated into a new proposed supplier evaluation IT-system. This suggested system has been designed as a cloud-based solution and with an emphasis of being easy-to-use. The goal of this IT-system is to gather all the data being used in the evaluation into a better structure, decrease the manual labour needed for the evaluation, increase the flexibility of the process and provide better and more meaningful data as a basis of decision making. In this proposed IT-system there are suggested functionalities, design and data requirements that aim to fulfill the objectives and goals of the system. To illustrate this an interactive mock-up of the system has been created to give the reader a feel for how the system works and how users can use this system to carry out their tasks in the supplier evaluation process in an effective and efficient way.