| In this thesis, a literature survey is conducted to study the change of manufacturing paradigm, competitive intelligence and the need for supplier intelligence in supply chain management in the operations of outsourcing manufacturing. Different approaches to supplier selection from mathematical, analytical to heuristic are reviewed, and the major feature and merits of case-based reasoning (CBR) are introduced.; The system approach to design an intelligent supplier management framework is addressed. Based on supplier past performance record, a case based reasoning engine is build to select appropriate suppliers during the existing and new product development (NPD) process. The system, referred as intelligent supplier management system (ISMS), is constructed by integrating a company's supplier ratings and product codes, and suppliers' performance records in the outsourced activities. The aim is to transfer customer requirements directly to supplier bases in order to shorten the total time for getting the product to the market. A workflow for matching customer demand to supplier's capabilities during the outsourcing process is explained.; The design methodology and architecture of the supplier selection and evaluation module, which represents one of the main works of ISMS, is also described. A generic 5-tier design principle for the integration of supplier ratings and product codes is explained while the methodology of building cases into the system and the way to retrieve cases from it are addressed. When implementing the supplier management system, the taxonomy of a generic 5-tier CBR supplier selection module is built. The construction of a decision tree with the linkage of supplier performance report as well as the setting of a specific indexing method is equally important in linking the supplier ratings and product codes during system implementation. The process of ensuring the information is operational, the type of hardware and IT infrastructure requirement for the system, and the training program required for allowing users to take over its operations for use and evaluation are discussed.; Two industrial case studies in Honeywell Consumer Products (Hong Kong) Limited and Motorola Semiconductors (Hong Kong) Limited for testing and benchmarking ISMS were carried out. In both cases, the building of an essential knowledge domain into ISMS is essential. The steps are demonstrated through the configuration of cases by the Case Authoring module (CA), the retrieval of results by the Problem Resolution module (PR), and the coordination of the whole system by the Domain Manager module (DA). (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
