A decision support tool for sustainable supplier selection in manufacturing firms
Ifeyinwa Orji, Sun Wei
2014
Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management
Purpose: Most original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are strategically involved in supplier base rationalization and increased consciousness of sustainable development. This reinforces need for accurately considering sustainability in supplier selection to improve organizational performance. In real industrial case, problems are unavoidable and pose huge challenge to accurately incorporate sustainability factors into supplier selection. Such problems include imprecise data, ambiguity of human
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... udgment, uncertainty among sustainability factors and the need to capture all subjective and objective criteria Design/methodology/approach: This study develops a model based on integrated multicriteria decision making (MCDM) methods to solve such problems. The developed model applies Fuzzy logic, DEMATEL and TOPSIS to effectively analyze the interdependencies between sustainability criteria and to select the best sustainable supplier in fuzzy environment while capturing all subjective and objective criteria. A case study is illustrated to test the proposed model in a gear manufacturing company, an OEM to provide insights and for practical applications. Findings: Results show that social factors of sustainability ranks as the most important in sustainable supplier selection. RFP ranks as the most important sub-criterion with score of 3. 7442. Also, the highest net causers are WS and quality with scores of 1.2818 and 0.3409 -1293-Journal of Industrial Engineering and Management -http://dx.doi.org/10.3926/jiem.1203 respectively. This implies that during sustainable supplier selection, it is suggested that emphasis should be placed on work safety and quality of the respective suppliers. A 6 is identified as the best possible sustainable supplier with a relative closeness to the ideal solution L i of 0.527. This is as a result of A 6 being closest to the positive ideal solution and farthest from the negativeideal solution during implementing sustainable supplier selection in the case study. Originality/value: The model is capable of capturing all subjective and objective criteria in fuzzy environment to accurately incorporate sustainability factors in supplier selection. Work safety and quality necessitates the most emphasis during implementing sustainable supplier selection because they highly influence all other sub-criteria.
doi:10.3926/jiem.1203
fatcat:nweeqkybcrcvhcu6ajp2v7im3a