Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1 Department of Industrial Management, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, University of Mazandaran, Babolsar Iran
2 University of Mazandaran
3 Department of Industrial Engineering, Istinye University, Istanbul, Turkey.
Abstract
Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant crisis in society’s health, industries, and businesses. In this regard, the medical devices industry has played an important role in crisis management and providing healthcare and has faced with several major challenges in supplying raw materials, production activities, and distribution activities due to the disruptions caused by the pandemic. One of the critically important issues in the medical devices supply chain is supplier selection. Hence, this research investigates the supplier selection problem considering the emerging concepts, which have dramatically attracted the attention of researchers after the COVID-19 pandemic, namely viability and Industry 5.0.
Methodology: In this study, a hybrid fuzzy decision-making approach is developed to investigate the viable supplier selection problem considering the Industry 5.0 dimensions. In this regard, in the first stage, according to the literature and experts, the main indicators of the research problem are extracted and then their weights are calculated using the fuzzy best-worst method. In the next stage, by employing the fuzzy VIKOR method, the feasible suppliers are evaluated. Also, to show the robustness and validation of the proposed approach, its results are compared with the traditional approaches.
Findings: In this study, a list of indicators, including six aspects and 34 criteria, is provided for the research problem based on its nature and their importance have been computed. Based on the outputs, the general metric is the most important aspect and the human-centricity metric is the least significant one. Also, the results show that in addition to the general criteria, such as cost and quality, other criteria such as reliability, technical capability, pollution control, risk reduction and service also play a significant role in the process of selecting suppliers and managers should pay special attention to these indicators in nowadays competitive marketplace.
Originality/Value: Reading the results of this research can help the Industrial and organizational managers to evaluate the potential suppliers of their companies based on the viability and Industry 5.0 dimensions, and select the best ones, which can significantly improve the performance and efficiency of their businesses.
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