Abstract
Environmental protection has been increasingly emphasized by stakeholders, including social organizations, the government, and the public. As a result, building a sustainable supply chain has now become a part of social corporate responsibility as well as a challenge for firms, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Taking a chemical enterprise (called enterprise C, in this paper) as an example, this paper uses quality function deployment (QFD) techniques and sets up a house of quality (HOQ) to investigate how a SME can achieve sustainable supply chain management. Specifically, in this paper we build a performance measurement system focusing on economic performance, environmental performance, and social performance. These three types of performance measure, in turn, include fifty-nine secondary indicators. Furthermore, an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been adopted to calculate the weight of each indicator. Benchmarking has also been used, to determine how much the enterprise should improve on each indicator. Based on the HOQ model, we conclude that avoiding waste, recycling resources, and sustainable exploitation are most important internal abilities of enterprise C.
Highlights
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) contribute greatly to the economy of many countries.small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are responsible for approximately 70% of global industrial pollution [1]
Pedersen and Loucks et al pointed out that sustainable development strategies and approaches need to be innovated to consider the various characteristics of SMEs, as replicating exactly what large firms are doing in sustainability have been found inappropriate [3,4]
This is achieved by using the quality function deployment (QFD) method, combining an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and benchmarking for guiding supply chain design in SMEs
Summary
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) contribute greatly to the economy of many countries. There exists another research gap in how to guide sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) in developing countries, toward its strategic implementation. In order to fill these two research gaps, this study presents a novel integrated model of supply chain management for SMEs, by taking sustainability requirements in the Chinese context. This is achieved by using the quality function deployment (QFD) method, combining an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and benchmarking for guiding supply chain design in SMEs. An analysis of a cement manufacturing enterprise (called enterprise C, in this paper), which is a representative SME, is conducted to illustrate and validate our approach. The last section concludes, discusses the limitations of this paper, and proposes future research directions
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