Selection of Sustainable Suppliers

Due to the growing importance of environment and sustainability in global business, organizations are trying their best to make their production systems sustainable. Today, the focus is not only on individual production systems, but also on sustainability issues in the supply chain. In the supply chain network, organizations are forced to streamline their purchasing activities in order to be competitive in the global market. To manage the purchasing activities proficiently, the selection process of sustainable suppliers has become very important. Initially, the cost was one of the important factors for supplier evaluation, but due to increasing competition and globalization of the business activities, the cost of a product has already been standardized in the market and other factors such as quality, flexibility, reliability, geographical location, market share, sustainability, etc., have become more prominent in supplier evaluation. Presently, the market is highly volatile due to uncertainty in demand, short product life cycle, increasing awareness of customers regarding product quality, cost, technology, etc. In this situation, the role of a supplier in supply chain becomes crucial to meet the market uncertainty in terms of volume and variety. The buyers expect that suppliers should be sustainable in terms of cost, quality, flexibility, and green operations. In this chapter, an approach to select sustainable suppliers has been illustrated. The performances of suppliers are evaluated using fuzzy TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution). TOPSIS is an outranking method in which decision-making units are rated against the criteria and evaluated by finding closeness to the ideal solution. This chapter may help managers to incorporate multiple decision makers in the decision-making process. In addition to this, the linguistic vagueness of the decision makers can be captured in terms of the inputs.