Evaluating the Strategic Importance of Procured Products in the Manufacturing Sector: A Stratified MCDM Approach with Clustering

Manufacturers need to formulate sourcing strategies to efficiently manage the supply of products to gain competitive advantages. There are two significant challenges in evaluating the strategic importance of procured products for the manufacturing sector to implement a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach. The first challenge is out of the uncertainties in the supply market. The traditional MCDM approaches didn’t consider the occurrences of future events in the supply market, which may impact the weightings of criteria. The second challenge is to rate many products as alternatives under each criterion. Stakeholders may question the rating process that relies solely on the decision-makers' preferences and judgment, considering ratings to be subjective. However, the two challenges are underexplored in previous research. Therefore, this study aims to develop an integrated decision-making framework that considers the likely dynamics within the supply market when weighing criteria and mitigates subjectivity when giving rates to alternatives. The framework combines four decision-making methods: SMCDM, BWM, k-means, and fuzzy VIKOR. The framework will be tested in a case study in the polymer manufacturing industry.