Researchers and practitioners are aware of the relevance of supplier portfolio management to achieve a company’s strategic goals. Yet, there is a scarcity of procurement tools able to support purchasing managers at a strategic, tactical and operational level able to guarantee consistency of decisions and actions at different time horizons. Decision support systems (DDSs) mainly focus on the supplier selection phase, while in general purchasing portfolio models focus on the analysis and segmentation of suppliers at a specific moment in time. This paper presents a DSS for supplier portfolio management, which aligns decisions and actions at different levels and time horizons through a three-steps procedure: 1) Tracing a route, which aims to trace future directions and strategic decisions of portfolio management in a long-term perspective; 2) Control, which aims to understand if the current portfolio is consistent with the route traced in the long-term and to support decision makers in the identification of a ‘Roadmap of change’ to build a supplier portfolio which reflects the route traced; 3) Taking actions, which aims to identify and implement a consistent ‘Purchasing action plan’. This research follows a design science paradigm: the proposed DSS has been conceptualized and implemented based on precise design objectives, while ex-ante and ex-post evaluations in both artificial and naturalistic settings were applied to demonstrate the novelty, relevance and utility of this artifact.
