Modelling customer and technical requirements for sustainable supply chain planning

Abstract

Sustainable supply chains are the need of modern times. In order to make them successful, listening to voice of the customer and integrating them in the design and development phases of supply chains are very important. In this paper, we propose a technique called sustainability function deployment (SFD) developed on the concept of quality function deployment (QFD) to model customer and technical requirements, establish relationship between them and prioritise them for developing sustainable supply chains. SFD gathers customer and technical requirements for sustainable supply chain planning using C-REQ and T-REQ surveys, generates priority of customer requirements using Priority Matrix, performs screening of technical requirements using gap analysis, and generates requirements weights using QFD, thereby providing a structured approach to the decision-makers to select the right areas of improvement. Both the customer and technical requirements are captured from a socio-economic-environmental perspective. Results of application of the proposed technique are provided. The strength of the proposed approach is its novelty in integration of priority matrix and gap analysis in prioritising requirements based on their importance and performance in SFD. Besides, SFD facilitates modelling of complex, interrelated requirements in sustainable supply chain planning.

Keywords:

• sustainable supply chains
• quality function deployment
• voice of the customer
• priority matrix
• gap analysis
• sustainability function deployment