A Hybrid Model for Supply Chain Risk Management Based on Five-dimensional Sustainability Approach in Telecommunication Industry

Abstract

Sustainability of supply chain risk management is one of the main competitive advantages of every organization for long-standing. There are several models in the research literature to manage sustainability risks of the supply chain. Considering that critical risks have the highest impact and have the largest share of risk management resources, they need to be identified using special techniques to make risk management more accurate and more reliable. In this paper, a new three-phase model is presented to supply chain sustainability risks management. This model includes the failure mode and effects analysis phase for identifying and assessing all risks and classification them, fuzzy VIKOR phase for ranking critical risks, and management phase to deal with critical risks. The categorization of risks was conducted according to a new five-dimensional approach to sustainable progress, including environmental, economic, social, technical, and organizational aspects on various sectors of the supply chain. The telecommunication industry of Iran is considered to show the model performance. The results indicated that consideration of the fuzzy VIKOR phase is necessary in order to accurately assess critical risks because of the priority of critical risks is not correctly identified through Failure mode and effects analysis due to the shortcomings of this method and cause errors. It was also found that the technical risks initiated by the organization are the most dangerous risk that threatens the sustainability of the supply chain.