A contingent approach to the design of vendor selection systems for different types of co‐operative customer/supplier relationships

Literature on supply chain management has been recently stressing the need for co‐operation and integration between suppliers and customers, highlighting the critical role played by the supplier in contributing to the overall performance of the purchaser. Consequently supplier selection is one of the purchasing manager’s most critical tasks, as demonstrated by the number of articles that have dealt with vendor selection criteria and techniques in the light of the requirements of the new environment. The paper proposes four different vendor selection systems (VSSs) depending on the time frame (short‐term versus long‐term) and on the content (logistic versus strategic) of the co‐operative customer/supplier relationships. More precisely, the suggested VSSs consider, in an analytic hierarchy process framework, different sets of measures, deriving from a non‐conventional model of the supplier based on the dynamic system and on the resource‐based approach.