Evaluating Wheat Suppliers Using Fuzzy MCDM Technique: Comparison
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Wheat has significantly impacted food security in numerous countries. Like the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, Jordan’s daily diet contains a sizable amount of wheat. Further, Jordan is dealing with several issues, including rapid population growth, water scarcity, widespread urbanization, and limited agricultural wheat production. Thus, it imports most of its wheat and wheat products. Moreover, the method of selecting suppliers in Jordan is unique, as private importers import for the benefit of the government, and thus, the selection of suppliers is carried out by importers.

  • wheat supply chain
  • supplier selection
  • MCDM

1. Introduction

Wheat is a basic product in most countries, especially in the Middle East and Jordan, where the food table is packed with wheat derivatives. It serves as a regular meal in the form of bread, pasta, sweets, or many other wheat products. Therefore, it is the main and most basic commodity that the government manages through the import, storage, and distribution of wheat. According to the Ministry of Industry and Trade (MITS) [1], the average monthly consumption of wheat is approximately 90,000 tons. The concerned government authorities, namely the MITS, periodically initiate invitations to bid/request for proposal (RFP) for the purchase of wheat under specific conditions and specifications in cooperation with the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) [2] and the Jordan Standards and Metrology Organization (JSMO) [3]. The tender quantity depends on the available storage capacity, consumption, warehouse management, strategic food security plans, and storage conditions. The tender is usually delivered to the port of Aqaba or to the storage warehouses, that is, carriage and insurance paid (CIP). Therefore, the tender includes the costs of purchase, shipping, transportation, handling, insurance, and other fees and costs. The import of wheat in Jordan is different, where the concerned authorities in the government issue an invitation to tender (ITT) and the applicants have to choose the suppliers according to the announced conditions, meaning that the government does not directly choose the supplier, but rather, the applicant or bidder chooses it.
The conditions of the tender should be clearly indicated in advance and include specifications, quality, timing, the solvency of the supplier, necessary procedures, contractual and financial matters, and the necessary tests and acceptance conditions. Post-award of the tender, the concerned authorities should also follow the specifications for storing and distributing wheat according to the principles set for this purpose. Furthermore, it should ensure the availability of a strategic stock of this product for certain periods, usually six months to one year at least.
The main wheat specifications include the origin, protein, test weight, moisture, virtuousness, fall number, wet gluten, soft grain admixture, foreign matter, and grain admixture [4,5][4][5]. The key processing quality parameters are grain hardness, protein concentration and quality, and gluten strength. Wheat varieties depend on the producers’ classifications, which generally include durum, hard white, soft white, hard red winter, hard red spring, and soft red winter. Previous studies have not been carried out either for Jordan or the MENA region that rate or choose the top wheat providers [6,7,8,9,10,11,12][6][7][8][9][10][11][12].
One of the primary challenges in decision-making is to pick the optimal alternative after considering many selection criteria. Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques are commonly used for handling a variety of decision-making criteria. Due to these techniques’ ability to compute, they have been used extensively in the supply chain field.
The advantage of the VIKOR technique is that it can select a compromise option that represents the views of the majority of decision-makers. The key phase of this strategy is selecting and sorting the results according to multiple sets of criteria. The VIKOR approach was developed to address problems in MCDM, including complex, conflicting, and unrelated criteria. It is used to gather decision-makers’ viewpoints on supplier selection (SS) as a group MCDM problem in the form of linguistic words. With the original (provided) weights, it determines the compromise ranking list and the solution. When there are competing criteria, this strategy focuses on ranking and choosing from a group of choices.

2. MCDM Technique 

The agri-food supply chain includes the transfer of agricultural products from the point of production to consumers. The agri-food SC encompasses all the phases of agricultural food production and processing, including production, processing, storage, trading, distribution, and consumption. The agri-food industry plays a vital role in political and economic growth and development. It has a significant impact on sustainability in terms of meeting human needs, fostering employment and economic growth, and protecting the environment [13]. All parties involved must work to reduce logistics costs and gain a competitive advantage in the global market. Consequently, it is crucial to develop excellent agricultural and food logistics [14]. Further, following COVID-19, agricultural supply chains (ASCs) have been exposed to sudden disruptions [15]. Therefore, ASC management is extremely important as it is vulnerable to errors [16]. The future of ASC management can consider organic agriculture, agricultural technological advancements, the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain technology, and smart farming [17]. Wheat is one of the most important agricultural crops worldwide, particularly because it is consumed directly by people rather than being utilized as livestock feed. Technologies and management techniques to increase output in a sustainable way while simultaneously supplying more nutrient-dense food are urgently needed by wheat farming and wheat-based food industries to fulfill the demands of a growing global population [18]. The supply chain for wheat is controlled by a small number of nations in North America and Europe [19]. Wheat has been greatly affected by the COVID-19 outbreak because crop harvesting and lockdown disrupted the supply chain and prices [20]. Wheat cultivation has a significant role in the sustainability of the wheat supply chain [21]; therefore, for its success, the supply chain must be committed to and involved in sustainable collective innovations [22]. Careful selection of suppliers can reduce procurement costs, improve supply quality and reliability, and increase the company’s profit margins by lowering upstream supply chain risk. To choose the best suppliers, a decision-maker must compromise between tangible and intangible criteria [23]. Companies must find and optimize strategic supplier networks to select cooperative networks and boost supply network competence [24]. Supplier selection is a difficult problem that involves several criteria. In any supply chain, choosing a supplier and making a purchase choice are crucial because they present opportunities to save expenses and boost revenues [25]. Industry 4.0 and digitalization are making it increasingly necessary for managers to make judgments on their suppliers quickly and accurately. MCDM approaches are one of the various decision-support technologies available to managers [26]. Creating an integrated supply chain for wheat-based products would involve both long-term decisions about choosing a supplier and setting up new silos and short-term decisions about how to distribute wheat and its products. Any SS model should choose the suppliers, decide on the quantity of imports, distribute wheat, and produce products from it [27]. An EBM assessment method can be utilized to evaluate the production efficiency of companies on a micro level [28]. Further, utilizing data analytics and IoT as a component of meat and poultry farm green supply chain inventory optimization to evaluate and identify obstacles that must be subjugated through essential suppliers’ collaborations can also be considered [29]. Moreover, introducing a two-stage, multi-criteria supplier selection model for an uncertain automotive SC can also be contemplated. The MCDM approach blends the gray complex proportional assessment and the spherical fuzzy analytical hierarchical process [30]. Another novel MCDM that can be utilized to select the best suppliers is the BCM. It is used to solve the problem of an incomplete pairwise comparison matrix and calculate the missing comparison values. It has been proven that the new techniques are successful in identifying the best alternative solutions [31,32][31][32]. Solutions for complex systems can be accomplished using the multi-criteria optimization and compromise solution (VIKOR) approach. When there are competing criteria, this strategy focuses on ranking and selecting from a group of choices. The fuzzy-VIKOR algorithm was developed using fuzzy operations and methods to rank fuzzy numbers. Resolving the issue of evaluating and selecting potential suppliers has recently emerged as a crucial strategic consideration for corporate organizations. The VIKOR technique was created to address challenges in MCDM with competing and incommensurable criteria. It is used to collect the opinions of decision-makers in the form of linguistic terms for SS as a group MCDM problem [33]. To address the issues with SS, researchers developed a hierarchical MCDM model based on fuzzy set theory and the VIKOR method [34]. It chooses the best supplier using a model that combines fuzzy-VIKOR with an artificial neural network [35], adjusts the VIKOR approach for intuitionistic fuzzy data for supplier evaluation and selection while including both the subjective and objective weights of the criterion [36], and uses fuzzy-VIKOR to evaluate and choose suppliers while taking both broad and resilient factors into account [37]. Jordanian businesses should concentrate on supply chain procedures by choosing suppliers based on quality, allowing two-way communication of grievances and ideas to improve product quality, and involving suppliers in planning and developing new goods [38]. Successful supply chain performance must be implemented and maintained, coupled with appropriate coordination and information exchange through the various stages of the value chain [39]. Strategic relationships with suppliers have the biggest impact [40]. Knowledge management mediates the ties among suppliers, technological innovation (TI), and customers [41]. Jordanian businesses’ supply chain flexibility must be improved because it has a significant impact on customer satisfaction [42]. SCs should constantly use technology to survive conflicts and competitions. Supplier diversification is a crucial element, and the pandemic and government actions are likely to usher in a new era of SC localization and regionalization. Increasing SC visibility and automation require network agility and partners’ integration [43]. The MENA supply chain is susceptible to numerous disruptions and instabilities that result in unexpected interferences with decisions and make the SC uneasy. Nervousness decreases effectiveness and has a detrimental effect on SC performance. Stress has a significant negative impact on the stability and resilience of the supply chain, thus raising prices and changing the relationships between suppliers and consumers [44]. The Middle East has long served as a hub for international trade, promoting economic expansion and stimulating the diversification of new markets. The Middle East is not risk-free. Because of its location near sanctioned nations and its centuries-old commercial ties, supply chain actors have had to manage an expanding spectrum of environmental, legal, regulatory, and geopolitical risks as an indispensable part of doing business [45]. The biggest hurdles in the Middle Eastern SC are culture, regulatory environment, lack of government backing, and top management [46]. MENA supply chain workers rely heavily on the do-it-yourself strategy, which deviates from global trends and appears to have a detrimental influence on service levels, competitive advantage, and profitability [47]. Approximately 37% of the calories consumed in the MENA region are from wheat. The MENA region is the world’s largest net importer of wheat [6]. The organization of the industry is crucial for research on food security in the region and how countries maintain a sustainable supply of wheat because of the region’s substantial reliance on imported wheat [7]. As the majority of Jordan’s wheat and barley are imported via the Black Sea, the Russian War in Ukraine directly affected Jordan. In 2022–2023, Jordan was projected to produce 30,000 tons of wheat, which is less than the two-week supply of the nation’s anticipated 960,000 tons of yearly consumption [8]. 34% of Jordan’s total wheat supply from both domestic production and imports was lost or squandered, costing the nation approximately USD 105 million annually and contributing to significant losses in natural resources [9]. Grain prices will rise further because of Russia’s decision to leave the Black Sea Grain Accord and the global oil crisis. Wheat prices reached an all-time high after the Russia-Ukraine War. Every month, the kingdom consumes 90,000 tons of wheat. Jordan imports nearly 95% of the strategic grains it requires [10]. Fueled by fear of war, Jordan’s wheat imports in 2022/2023 are expected to reach 1.3 million tons [11]. Jordan faces many difficulties, including rapid population expansion and heavy urbanization. Owing to Jordan’s strategic location, environmental factors, including water scarcity and low soil quality, are harsh realities that cannot be changed. The nation is experiencing a severe water deficit because of population pressure, which has accelerated urbanization. Despite the increasing need for food, agriculture is not a promising alternative [12]. Numerous factors affect the choice of supplies, such as the cost of the product in issue, the number of producers, the cost of inputs, technological advancements, the cost of alternative products, and erratic variables such as weather. Although agriculture does not ensure food security in Jordan, it makes the process exorbitant and ultimately unsustainable. There are no studies concerned with ranking or selecting the best wheat suppliers in Jordan or the MENA region.

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