‘Look, why should we waste our time dealing with suppliers who can merely deliver good product, on time, and in full? There are any number of suppliers who can do that. What we are interested in is developing a set of suppliers who will be able to supply us with suitable components for the generation of products that comes after the next products we launch. It’s the underlying capability of suppliers that we are really interested in.’

(a) Devise a set of criteria that this manager could use to evaluate alternative suppliers.

(b) Suggest ways in which she could determine how to weight each criterion.