IDENTIFICATION OF SWOT VARIABLES FOR SUPPLIER SELECTION THROUGH CONFIRMATORY FACTOR ANALYSIS ? A CASE STUDY

Selection of supplier, process has gained important recently. An extensive range of decision making methods have been suggested by several authors to handle the supplier selection problem. The selection of supplier is often faced by ambiguity and vagueness in practice and very often decision makers express their preference in linguistic terms instead of numerical values. So, this study examines the consistency approach by confirmatory factor analysis that determines the strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats of different suppliers. This paper seeks to identify the SWOT variables to make better strategic planning through empirical study after identifying 26 SWOT variables, a rating type questionnaire have been made to all top management, managerial level and supervisory level (300 nos). These executives were surveyed by interview method and email method from different process and product based industries. Confirmatory Factor Analysis was used to reduce and group of the SWOT variables. From this analysis five non-significant variables are removed from the SWOT data set and twenty six are found as significant for further analysis. This analysis will help the company to overcome the external threats and also plan the selection of best supplier.