Integrating AHP and TOPSIS for Evidence-Based Supplier Evaluation in the Pharmaceutical Industry

ACI Pharma typically spends between $12 and $15 million annually on brand marketing activities, with portions of that funding used to create printed promotional materials that clearly convey scientific knowledge to relevant stakeholders and medical expert audiences. Previous iterations of supporting evidence among promotions find that these limitations significantly undermine marketing initiatives overall from effectiveness and efficiency perspectives due to a subjective evaluation of suppliers. Given that the lack of real evaluation and integration of operations has contributed to an undermined competitive performance, this study tackles these issues through the integration of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) as a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method for developing an evidence-driven supplier evaluation methodology specifically for advanced chemical industries (ACI) Pharma. The proposed AHP-TOPSIS methodology enables a transparent, consistent supplier assessment, based on multiple performance criteria, including communications, flexibility, price, quality, and delivery. The results show that supplier S2 consistently had the highest closeness coefficient (CC) or performance score, and this ranking is validated by sensitivity analysis to be stable when criterion weights vary ±10%. Overall, ACI Pharma now has a consistent, practical, and objective way to select the best vendors for printed promotional materials, while also enhancing competitiveness and efficiency with procurement.