Evaluating Suppliers for Healthcare Centre using Ordinal Priority Approach

Abstract

Supplier selection is one of the most critical problems in the industry. In the healthcare sector, where the tolerance level for mistakes and errors is low, the need to improve the supplier evaluation system is ever increasing. Earlier, the cardinal data-based mathematical models played an important role in supplier selection however since last few decades, the emphasis on the decision-making methods that can handle ordinal relations is gaining exceeding attention. The development of the Ordinal Priority Approach (OPA) is an essential milestone in this regard that is being used in the current study to evaluate the suppliers of a Chinese healthcare facility. The study confirms that the OPA is convenient and powerful approach that can single-handedly estimate the weights of suppliers, criteria and experts. The results demonstrated the feasibility and validity of the approach for healthcare supplier selection problems.