Green supply chain management framework for supplier selection: an integrated multi-criteria decision-making approach

ABSTRACT

This research aims to propose a green supply chain management framework to evaluate supplier organizations. A real-world supplier selection problem is considered, in which three India-based supplier organizations are selected from three different industrial segments, namely, Organization A (service organization), Organization B (manufacturing organization), and Organization C (process organization). Six important criteria are identified from the literature, which encompass both the environmental, economic, and operational aspects of the sustainability. Data is collected through developing a questionnaire, establishing a committee of experts from the strategic, tactical, and operational levels, and carrying out surveys. An integrated multi-criteria decision-making approach is proposed in which the entropy method determines criteria weights and complex proportional assessment, technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution, and grey relational analysis rank the supplier organizations separately. Results show that the manufacturing organization is the benchmark organization and its strategies can guide other organizations to enhance their performance. Results also reveal that ‘Total energy consumption’, ‘Total scrap material generation’, and ‘Renewable energy utilization’ are the influential parameters that should predominantly be considered for green supplier selection. This research may assist policymakers to build appropriate sourcing strategies for overall sustainable development.

KEYWORDS:

• Green supply chain management
• green supplier selection
• performance evaluation
• MCDM
• benchmark organization

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Department of Higher Education, Science & Technology and Biotechnology (DST), Govt. of West Bengal, India for providing the financial support to carry out this research. The authors are grateful to the anonymous industry experts, managers, and staff who contributed by providing the necessary data and information for this research.

CRediT authorship

Sudipta Ghosh: Conceptualization, Methodology, Visualization, Investigation, Data Curation, Software, Writing-Original draft preparation. Madhab Chandra Mandal: Investigation, Data Curation. Amitava Ray: Supervision, Writing-Reviewing and Editing.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Department of Higher Education, Science & Technology and Biotechnology (DST), Govt. of West Bengal [185-(Sanc)/ST/P/S&T/6G-18/2017].