供應商的評選是供應鏈管理上最重要的工作之一。由於產品生命週期的縮短，製造商更應利用現有供應鏈優勢，來減少新產品自設計到上市的生產時間，與增加競爭力。實務上，潛在供應商名單來自於採購人員的專業與經驗，再依詢比議價結果，決定最佳供應商。然而不同的採購人員會產生不同之供應商提名與不同的最佳供應商人選的結果。因此，如何避免採購人員之專業與經驗不同的影響，找到最合適的供應商已經變成是相當重要的議題。本研究參考實際的採購作業流程，建立兩階段的供應商評選方法。第一階段利用案例式推理，以新產品零組件的物料描述比對資料庫中的物料描述，來計算餘弦相似度後，建立潛在供應商候選群名單。第二階段是以理想解類似度偏好順序評估法(TOPSIS法)對第一階段的潛在供應商進行績效排序，評估準則包括品質、交期、成本與供貨可行性。評估準則的權重值是由決策者事前決定。經由案例探討，本研究發現由TOPSIS法所求得之最佳供應商與資深採購人員在實際採購作業所建議之最佳供應商相同。在此亦代表本研究所提出的兩階段供應商評選方法可用來幫助採購人員進行供應商評選。

Supplier selection is one of the most important jobs of supply chain management. Because of the reducing of product life cycle, manufacturers have to utilize the existing supply chain to shorten the time from design to market as well as improve their competition. In fact, buyers will nominate the potential suppliers by their expertise and experience to decide the most appropriate candidates based on the RFQ (request for quotation) and negotiation result. However, different buyers lead to different potential supplier list and supplier evaluation outcomes. Therefore, it becomes an important issue to find the most appropriate supplier regardless of the differences of the expertise and experience of buyers. Similar to the purchasing process, we propose a two-stage method for supplier selection. The first stage employs the case-based reasoning method to find potential suppliers by calculating the cosine similarity of new material description with the old ones stored in a database. Then the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is used in the second stage to rank the potential suppliers by their performance that is evaluated by the following factors: quality, delivery, cost, and supply possibility. The weights of the factors are set up in advance by decision makers. For the case analyzed in this study, the most appropriate supplier determined by the TOPSIS method is identical to the one suggested by a senior professional buyer. This demonstrates that the method proposed by this study can be helpful to the buyers for supplier selection.

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