Abstract
Chemical industry plays a pivotal role in the economy in every country. As chemical hazardous materials are usually characterized as inflammable, explosive, toxic, corrosive, and carcinogenic, if accidents happen in chemical company it can lead to irreversible environmental and health damage to the public. The chemical industry attaches great importance to safe production, technical professionalism, and service standardization. Nowadays, under the trend of equipment maintenance service outsourcing in chemical companies, the selection of maintenance suppliers with safe and sustainable records come first and foremost in the supplier selection process. However, these concerns from the chemical industry are currently inadequately addressed by most general supplier selection models. Therefore, this paper proposes an applicable methodology for selecting and evaluating equipment maintenance suppliers in the chemical industry, compatible with a safe and sustainable production context. To achieve the goal of “safe operation and sustainable development in the future”, we established an evaluation criteria framework for equipment maintenance suppliers by combining the general supplier selection criteria and safe production characteristics together. Eight main criteria and 24 sub-criteria based on market acceptance, resource conditions, and safe production were included. Then a fuzzy TOPSIS model was presented to select the best equipment maintenance service supplier. Finally, by analyzing a case in W petrochemical company, the empirical results indicate that the proposed framework is of great practical value to select and evaluate equipment maintenance suppliers for safety and sustainable development in the chemical industry.
Highlights
Chemical industry plays an important role in the economy
Those industries are obviously different from the chemical industry in production safety, technical personnel professionalization, production specialization, and streamline production, which are so critical to the sustainable development for the industry
Safe operation of production equipment is the key to sustainable development of chemical companies
Summary
Chemical industry plays an important role in the economy. It is the basic and pillar industry of many countries. Previous research on supplier selection problems mainly focused on the general manufacturing industries, such as textile, clothing, automobile, and other industries [9] Those industries are obviously different from the chemical industry in production safety, technical personnel professionalization, production specialization, and streamline production, which are so critical to the sustainable development for the industry. General supplier selection criteria are not suitable for decision makers in chemical industry When it comes to the safety management of maintenance service, technical standards, guidelines, and specific procedures are available from previous studies. It is essential to establish a set of scientific, systematic, and standardized evaluation index systems for equipment maintenance suppliers Such systems can evaluate suppliers scientifically, improve the efficiency of equipment operation, and ensure the safety and sustainable production of chemicals within the industry
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