Sustainable Supplier Selection in Supply Chain Management

Sustainable supplier selection has emerged as a cornerstone of modern supply chain management, integrating environmental stewardship, social responsibility and economic performance into procurement decisions. At its core lies a multi-criteria decision-making framework that balances the traditional cost-and-quality paradigm with metrics for carbon footprint, resource efficiency, labour standards and governance. Methodological advances increasingly adopt hybrid models—combining analytic hierarchy and network processes, fuzzy-set theories and optimisation routines—to capture the interdependencies and uncertainties inherent in sustainability criteria. These approaches enable decision-makers to rank, classify and develop supplier portfolios that align with corporate sustainability strategies, regulatory demands and stakeholder expectations. Practical applications range from closed-loop network design that recovers value through reverse logistics to resilience planning that accounts for epidemic-induced disruptions. As global supply chains strive to decarbonise and achieve circularity, sustainable supplier selection serves both as a strategic lever for competitive advantage and as a mechanism for transforming upstream environmental and social impacts.

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Sustainable Supplier Selection in Supply Chain Management publication trend

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Technical terms

Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM): A collection of methods for evaluating alternatives against multiple, often conflicting criteria.

Best–Worst Method (BWM): A pairwise comparison technique to derive criterion weights by identifying the most and least important factors.

TODIM: A prospect-theory-based interactive multi-criteria decision-making approach used for ranking alternatives under risk and uncertainty.

Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA): A non-parametric linear programming method for assessing relative efficiency of decision-making units based on multiple inputs and outputs.

Spherical Fuzzy Set: An extension of fuzzy set theory that models uncertainty, hesitation and indeterminacy through three independent membership functions.

Grey Complex Proportional Assessment (Grey COPRAS): A multi-criteria ranking method that utilises grey numbers to handle incomplete or imprecise information in performance evaluation.

References

1. Analysis of supplier evaluation and selection strategies for sustainable collaboration: A combined approach of best–worst method and TOmada de Decisao Interativa Multicriterio. Business Strategy and the Environment (2023).
2. An Integrated Hybrid Approach for Circular supplier selection and Closed loop Supply Chain Network Design under Uncertainty. Journal of Cleaner Production (2020).
3. A Two-Stage Multi-Criteria Supplier Selection Model for Sustainable Automotive Supply Chain under Uncertainty. Axioms (2022).
4. A Novel Integrating Data Envelopment Analysis and Spherical Fuzzy MCDM Approach for Sustainable Supplier Selection in Steel Industry. Mathematics (2022).