A Decision Support Tool for Supplier Evaluation and Selection

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I have the following major concerns about this study.

1. The abstract should be revised and improved.
2. The authors should be consistent with the paragraph length. some paragraphs are 3 lines while the others are 12 lines.
3. The text and quality of Figure 1 & Figure 2 should be improved. 
4. Major implications of the study are missing.
5. What are the limitations of this study? And suggestions for future studies. 
6. The connection between the different sections is lacking in the current version of the manuscript.

 

Author Response

Dear Editor:

We have considered all the suggestions and we have improved our article following the reviewers´ comments and suggestions. In the revised manuscript (main document), the revisions have been marked using the “Track Changes” function so that any changes can be easily viewed by editors and reviewers.

We would like to thank the reviewer for the constructive and useful comments which help us to improve the manuscript. We have done our best to address all of them. Below, we respond (in blue colour) to the reviewer each comment and report the changes made in the revised manuscript accordingly.

Dear Reviewer -  Related to your precious comments and following your suggestions;

In this revised version, we tried to improve: the description of the content in a succinct and contextualized way in relation to the theoretical basis on the subject; discussion of results; the references.

The abstract should be revised and improved.

We revised and improved the Abstract, however, as the maximum number of words allowed for the Abstract is 200, we were somewhat limited.

The authors should be consistent with the paragraph length. some paragraphs are 3 lines while the others are 12 lines.

We changed the size of some paragraphs in order to be more balanced.

The text and quality of Figure 1 & Figure 2 should be improved.

We added figures with better quality and improved the text.

Major implications of the study are missing.

We tried to show how the findings may be important for practice, theory, and subsequent research.

What are the limitations of this study? And suggestions for future studies.

We added some limitations to this study in the conclusion and some suggestions for future studies.

 

 

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Supplier selection is a very important and complex kind of multi-criteria decision-making problem. The authors use the Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enrichment of Evaluations - Geometrical Analysis for Interactive Assistance method to classify and select suppliers in an agri-food company. The proposed approach allows decision-makers to set their preferences considering all the relevant criteria simultaneously, and their relative importance. The obtained results show that the supplier selection process has a strong point related to the existence of two groups of suppliers, one focused on economic criteria and the other related to the innovative capacity. However, the authors show that a flaw emerges in the little relevance that is associated with the environmental criterion. In my opinion, it is the problem of used method in this research and cannot be presented as a flaw. The paper is interesting scientific work. However, before accepting some shortcomings must be eliminated. My comments are listed as follows:
1. The abstract should more emphasise the contribution of the work. The influence of the result should be also presented in more detail.
2. the Introduction must be extended. There should be more information about the background (both methodological and practical).
3. There is a completely omitted section or part of the introduction where should be described MCDA methods like VIKOR, COMET and TOPSIS. It must be done. Why? Because the authors must prove and justify why PROMETHEE-GAIA should be used (properties of this approach in contrast rest of method.) I suggest add it like huge part of introduction or as separate section. There should be also papers where these methods are compared, i.e., 'Are mcda methods benchmarkable? a comparative study of topsis, vikor, copras, and promethee ii methods', 'Input data preprocessing for the MCDM model: COPRAS method case study', 'Application of Similarity Measures for Triangular Fuzzy Numbers in Modified TOPSIS Technique to Handling Data Uncertainty' or similar
4. There is a lack of discussion of similar research about supplier selection by using MCDA methods. There is a lot of works like example: 'Study Towards The Time-based Mcda Ranking Analysis–a Supplier Selection Case Study', 'Application of the Characteristic Objects Method in Supply Chain Management and Logistics' or similar 
5. Tables 3-5, there should be dots instead of commas.
6. Figures should be of better quality
7. Conclusions should be extended in future research directions.
 

 

Author Response

Dear Editor:

We have considered all the suggestions and we have improved our article following the reviewers´ comments and suggestions. In the revised manuscript (main document), the revisions have been marked using the “Track Changes” function so that any changes can be easily viewed by editors and reviewers.

We would like to thank the reviewer for the constructive and useful comments which help us to improve the manuscript. We have done our best to address all of them. Below, we respond  (in blue colour) to the reviewer each comment and report the changes made in the revised manuscript accordingly.

Dear Reviewer -  Related to your precious comments and feedbacks;

In this revised version, we tried to improve: the description of the content in a succinct and contextualized way in relation to the theoretical basis on the subject; discussion of results; the references.

 

1. The abstract should more emphasise the contribution of the work. The influence of the result should be also presented in more detail.

We revised and improved the Abstract, however, as the maximum number of words allowed for the Abstract is 200, we were somewhat limited.

2. The Introduction must be extended. There should be more information about the background (both methodological and practical).

We extended the introduction with more information about the background.

3. There is a completely omitted section or part of the introduction where should be described MCDA methods like VIKOR, COMET and TOPSIS. It must be done. Why? Because the authors must prove and justify why PROMETHEE-GAIA should be used (properties of this approach in contrast rest of method.) I suggest add it like huge part of introduction or as separate section. There should be also papers where these methods are compared, i.e., 'Are mcda methods benchmarkable? a comparative study of topsis, vikor, copras, and promethee ii methods', 'Input data preprocessing for the MCDM model: COPRAS method case study', 'Application of Similarity Measures for Triangular Fuzzy Numbers in Modified TOPSIS Technique to Handling Data Uncertainty' or similar

We've referenced some of the MCDM methods. The objective of our work is to apply only the PROMETHEE-GAIA tool to our data, be able to simulate different scenarios through and try to select the best supplier. The comparison of results obtained through different MCDM models, such as AHP or TOPSIS, will remain for a future research/practical work.

4. There is a lack of discussion of similar research about supplier selection by using MCDA methods. There is a lot of works like example: 'Study Towards The Time-based Mcda Ranking Analysis–a Supplier Selection Case Study', 'Application of the Characteristic Objects Method in Supply Chain Management and Logistics' or similar

We tried to show how the findings may be important for practice, theory, and subsequent research. The section results/discussion was improved.

 

5. Tables 3-5, there should be dots instead of commas.

We decided not to change to dot (which is used in English-speaking countries, for example); we can perfectly use the comma, to separate the whole part from the decimal part, and in order to maintain consistency with the results of the PROMETHEE GAIA Software, in which the results are presented with commas and not dots.

6. Figures should be of better quality

We added figures with better quality

7. Conclusions should be extended in future research directions.

We added to this study, in the conclusion, some suggestions for future studies.

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript is intersting and fit with the special edition of the journal.

Improvement suggestions:

The manucript is too short; this can be expanded by working more on Liteature review and add more related references.

Discussion section is missing, this is important to discuss your finding in details and show your research contribution here.

Add implications ( i think therortical implications will be approriate here)

Author Response

Dear Editor:

We have considered all the suggestions and we have improved our article following the reviewers´ comments and suggestions. In the revised manuscript (main document), the revisions have been marked using the “Track Changes” function so that any changes can be easily viewed by editors and reviewers.

We would like to thank the reviewer for the constructive and useful comments which help us to improve the manuscript. We have done our best to address all of them. Below, we respond (in blue colour) to the reviewer each comment and report the changes made in the revised manuscript accordingly.

Dear Reviewer -  Related to your precious comments and feedbacks;

In this revised version, we tried to improve: the description of the content in a succinct and contextualized way in relation to the theoretical basis on the subject; discussion of results; the references.

The manuscript is too short; this can be expanded by working more on Literature review and add more related references.

We worked a little more on the literature review and related references.

Discussion section is missing, this is important to discuss your finding in details and show your research contribution here. Add implications (I think theoretical implications will be appropriate here)

We tried to show how the findings may be important for practice, theory, and subsequent research. The section results/discussion was improved.

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The comments were well dealt with in revised manuscript. I have no further query in the present form of the paper and it can be accepted for publication in this journal.

Author Response

We would like to thank the reviewer for the constructive and useful comments which help us to improve the manuscript.

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have put much effort into improving their manuscript. However, there is still one major issue that has not been properly corrected. I cannot agree that the selection of the used method is not important (last review point #3). The justification of the used method is one of the most crucial things in the research. In the manuscript, we can found only general worlds about that these methods exist - "We've referenced some of the MCDM methods". I propose more justified it by using framework (Wątróbski et al., "Generalised framework for multi-criteria method selection") and comparison research results (e.g. Shekhovtsov et al. "Are MCDA methods benchmarkable? A comparative study of TOPSIS, VIKOR, COPRAS, and PROMETHEE II methods" or Palczewski et al. "Influence of various normalization methods in PROMETHEE II: an empirical study on the selection of the airport location"). In future research, I propose considerate more modern methods as BWM like as Faizi et al. "Best-worst method and hamacher aggregation operations for intuitionistic 2-tuple linguistic sets".  Of Course, I gave only examples of papers. After reading them, the authors can be certain that it will be easier to justify chosen methods. The references have to be also refreshing in according changes. The justification of the used method is one of the most crucial things in the research. Moreover, point #4 was not addressed at all. It is important to present that similar research is also proposed. It is important for justification. After these improvements, the paper will be ready to publish.

Author Response

We have considered all the suggestions and we have improved our article following the reviewer comments and suggestions. In the revised manuscript (R2), the revisions have been marked using the “Track Changes” function so that any changes can be easily viewed by editors and reviewer.

We would like to thank the reviewer for the constructive and useful comments which help us to improve the manuscript. We have done our best to address them.

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper has been improved according to my suggestions. Therefore, I propose accepting in the current form.