Abstract
Supplier evaluation is a relevant task of supply chain management where multicriteria methods make great contributions to manufacturing industries. This is not the case in food distribution companies, which have a key role in providing safe and affordable food to society. The purpose of this research is to measure the sustainability of products and suppliers in food distribution companies through a multiple criteria approach. Firstly, the system proposed provides indicators to qualify products and assess the food quality, using the compensatory Multi-Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) model. Secondly, these indicators are included in supplier evaluation, which takes economic, environmental, and social criteria into account. MAUT and Preference Ranking Organisation Method for Enrichment Evaluation (PROMETHEE), a non-compensatory method, are used for supplier evaluation. This approach has been validated for fresh food in a supermarket chain, mainly using historical data. Partial indicators, such as food safety scores, together with global indicators of suppliers, inform the most appropriate decisions and the most appropriate relations between companies and providers. Poor performance in food safety can lead to the disqualification of some suppliers. MAUT is good for qualifying products and is easy to apply at the operational level in logistic platforms, while PROMETHEE is more suitable for supplier segmentation, as it helps to identify supplier strengths and weaknesses.
Highlights
In recent decades, sustainability has been an increasing concern for a society that involves everything from countries to companies and consumers
Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to determine the weights of criteria, while we propose AHP or consensus among managers from all departments involved
Companies work in more complex and changing contexts, where selecting a small number of suppliers per product is the trend in supply chain management
Summary
Sustainability has been an increasing concern for a society that involves everything from countries to companies and consumers. Sustainability can be assessed in relation to different scopes, such as a sector, supply chain, company, supplier, and/or product. Many decision-making problems deal with this concept from different perspectives. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a common approach in the scientific literature dealing with product sustainability evaluation. LCA is not an appropriate tool to support decision making in Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM) [1]. The Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach is suitable to aggregate different dimensions of sustainability and provides a wide range of methods, which allow us to tackle a wide range of issues and support decision making [2]
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