Evaluation of Potential Manufacturing Suppliers Using Analytical Hierarchy Process and Cluster Analysis for Benchmarking

This paper proposes an assessment method for the potential outsourcees (suppliers) in agreement with thebenchmark evaluated for a set of surveyed UK based companies. The results of the survey are orderedusing Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Cluster Analysis (CA). The partial and total evaluation score ofeach supplier is compared with the benchmark. The outsourcee that achieves the highest total score couldbe considered as the most suitable match. The result of integrating AHP and CA may be applied as aneffective method for matching and evaluating the right outsourcee in the manufacturing sector.