Description
One of the Concerns of Multinational Companies (MNC) when they decide to produce in low-cost countries is to have a reliable domestic supplier base that guarantees a continuous flow of high-quality products from the region of production to the consumption markets. MNC may elect to strength its supplier base by a) asking current international suppliers to open facilities in a new sourcing region or b) investing in suppliers development programs. The objective of this work was to propose a methodology to identify those suppliers with the highest opportunity to attain acceptable levels of competitiveness and then define the contents of the more suitable development program. The selection of potential suppliers is based on the key criteria and indicators used in the automotive industrial sector in Mexico and with the support of the quantitative techniques of Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchical Process (FAHP) and Multidimensional Scaling (MDS). After a root-cause analysis, a series of development activities are defined for each supplier and those that will lead to the largest improvement given time and cost restrictions are selected through Goal Programming. The applicability of the proposed methodology is demonstrated for the case of the automotive sector, one of the most important sectors for the Mexican economy.