Decisions of intelligent support for food supplier’s selection in health care institutions

Abstract

Numerous publications have shown that food produced inside of the health care institution is better quality than transported from other places. So, managers face some rather serious problems: what is possibilities to get appropriate food raw materials, how to choose suppliers, which supplier is the best. These issues are relevant to every food production establishment, but are especially important for producing dietetic food. Particular attention must be paid to the quality of food, because in these institutions, food is needed not only to meet physiological needs, but also to treat certain diseases. The most of suppliers are commercial business companies, so health care institutions meet some difficulties in communication with commercial structures: possible uncertainty in suppliers’ commercial conditions, risks of choice, so finding the best supply chains are playing an increasing role especially for state health care institutions, which do not have experience in commercial activity. This in turn changes the relationship of business and suppliers. Changes in the relationship substantially increase the requirements for supplier selection. Increased requirements have led to much more intensive research into this problem. The aim of the research is to develop and to test practically a methodological tool to increase the efficiency of supplier selection in the healthcare institutions that produce food by themselves by applying multi-criteria methods. Summarizing scientific and professional literature of supplier selection, we see it meaningful to analyze supplier selection as a process. This is the precondition for the most appropriate disclosure of both the content of the selection and the chain of this multistep process. So, we found that suppliers’ selection is multicriteria task, therefore the use the simple additive weighting (SAW) multi-criteria evaluation method was the most suitable in this case. In order to create a practical tool for the [...]