Consultant selection for quality management using VIKOR method under fuzzy environment

Meditating entities such as consultants can play an important role in successful total quality management (TQM) programme implementation and helps the organisations to attain competitive advantage. In general, many factors affect the appropriate consultant selection problem which adheres to uncertain and imprecise data, and usually several people from different functional areas of the company are involved in this process. In this paper, an improved and more effective TQM consultant selection model has been developed through integrating VIKOR method with fuzzy set theory. Linguistic ratings are expressed in trapezoidal fuzzy numbers to assess the ratings and weights for these factors. A numerical example is proposed to illustrate an application of the proposed model.