Intelligent Procurement Scheduling System for Items Involving Public Procurement

The procurement of goods is considered a critical part in supply chain management, and it often has several unprecedented barriers leading to failure of the project. Uncertainties in availability, cost and demand-supply matching combined with stringent government norms andprocurement policies of various organizations need a thorough study in the present-day environment to develop sustainable and lean supplychain management. In this paper, use of a fuzzy logic system to estimate the tender finalization period of engineering items that involve public procurement is discussed. The tender finalization period is normally based on key parameters, such as criticality of the requirement of an item for the project, the number of variants available in a supply, competition amongst bidders, frequency of buying the item and the tender value. The methodology to arrive at the membership functions of the key parameters and the logic used to arrive at the tender finalization period estimation are well discussed in this paper. The proposed fuzzy logic approach was applied to an industrial case and the results show good agreement between expert opinion and the fuzzy logic system output. This paper will definitely help procurement managers in any organization to plan their activities in an effective manner.