The selection of air compressor is a Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem including conflicting criteria and various alternatives. Selecting the appropriate air compressor is an important decision for the company as it affects the energy consumption and operating cost. To aid the decision making process in the companies, MCDM methods are proposed in the literature. In all MCDM methods, the main goal is to select the best alternative or to rank a set of given alternatives. In this paper, the air compressor is selected for a spinning mill of a textile company with an integrated approach based on MACBETH (Measuring Attractiveness by a Categorical Based Evaluation TecHnique) and COPRAS (COmplex PRoportional ASsessment) methods. MACBETH method is utilized to determine the weights of the criteria. Then COPRAS method is used to determine the ranking of the alternatives and select the best one.

Supplier selection is always found to be a complex decision-making problem in manufacturing environment. The presence of several independent and conflicting evaluation criteria, either qualitative or quantitative, makes the supplier selection problem a candidate to be solved by multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) methods. Even several MCDM methods have already been proposed for solving the supplier selection problems, the need for an efficient method that can deal with qualitative judgments related to supplier selection still persists. In this paper, the applicability and usefulness of measuring attractiveness by a categorical-based evaluation technique (MACBETH) is demonstrated to act as a decision support tool while solving two real time supplier selection problems having qualitative performance measures. The ability of MACBETH method to quantify the qualitative performance measures helps to provide a numerical judgment scale for ranking the alternative suppliers and selecting the best one. The results obtained from MACBETH method exactly corroborate with those derived by the past researchers employing different mathematical approaches.