The Covid 19 pandemic has led to long-term disruption in the supply chain. Therefore, refocusing on the supplier selection process was a logical sequence. The new approach of viable suppliers appears as a solution to long-term disruption. This research aims to determine the importance of criteria in selecting suppliers within the Viable supplier framework. Based on the questionnaire, the opinion of companies with different profiles on the importance of the viable suppliers' criteria was collected. The ranking of the importance of the criteria in selecting viable suppliers was done with the IMF SWARA (Improved Fuzzy Stepwise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis) method. Based on the analysis, the criteria were ranked and the most important criterion is the Finance criterion. The findings can be a valuable basis for making public policies that will support project organizations to survive the long-term disruption of supply chains. The core contribution of this paper is about determining the importance of criteria in the selection of viable suppliers as a new approach to their selection. A significant amount of research has been done in the field of choosing sustainable suppliers, but this is one of the first works related to defining the significance of the criteria of viable suppliers using the MDCM method, which represents the novelty of this paper.