A Fuzzy SQFE approach in supplier's performance monitoring

SQFE (Suivi Qualite Par le Fournisseur Exterieur) approach will be used to measure and improve the quality of supplier products. It has been introduced by three automotive corporations: Peugeot, Citroen and Renault. As a useful procedure not only in monitoring the supplier performance, but also in verifying the quality of any kind of products, SQFE has not been considered in researches appropriately. In this method, the level of products' quality is determined based on the several categories of demerits which are identified in advance. There is a drawback in the classical SQFE. It assumes that the different degrees of severity related to the same demerit category must be presented as a crisp weight and equally treated. But, operators, gauges and environmental conditions as the parts of the measurement system, lead to the inevitable uncertainty. Therefore, in this research, the newly developed model, based on fuzzy concepts provides an estimate which accurately reflects the reality than those obtained using the procedures currently presented in standard. According to this scheme, due to taking the severity of different types of demerits into consideration, linguistic weights are applied to solve the weight assignment problem of classical SQFE, on the other hand sample observations are converted to triangular fuzzy numbers. After introducing the classical SQFE, developed fuzzy SQFE procedure is described in three steps. Moreover, a real empirical study is demonstrated for evaluation of effectiveness of the proposed model in practice.