A HYBRID AHP-BWM-ENTROPY FRAMEWORK FOR IDEAL SUPPLIER SELECTION

Strategic and efficient supplier selection is a crucial issue that significantly shapes a company’s success in a highly competitive and volatile business environment. The need for a resilient and sustainable supply chain is evident in such an environment. This study is an extension of the existing literature by presenting an integrated multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework for evaluating suppliers, taking into account not only traditional criteria such as cost, quality, and delivery, but also modern issues such as environmental sustainability and digital transformation. The study initially examined the following three weighting methods in detail: the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), the Best, Worst Method (BWM), and Entropy. The weights derived from these methods were subsequently used in the Simple Additive Weighting (SAW) procedure to order the suppliers. The model combines expert-based (AHP, BWM) and objective (Entropy) approaches to provide an in-depth, integrated, and balanced assessment of supplier performance. The findings illustrated that the supplier rankings varied in accordance with the weighting method, thus, emphasizing the significance of the weighting methods in the decision-making mechanism. It is worth mentioning that suppliers S3 and S8 were ranked at the bottom in all cases. The results highlight the importance of methodological awareness in decision-making processes and also reveal strong patterns in supplier performance. The proposed framework provides managers with a practical guide to support supplier strategies with broader operational and strategic objectives under different evaluation scenarios.