Ranking sustainable suppliers by context-dependent data envelopment analysis

Abstract

Sustainable supplier selection is one of the most critical activities for establishing an effective sustainable supply chain and is typically a multi-criteria decision-making problem. One of the important ways for evaluating sustainable suppliers is to use data envelopment analysis (DEA) models. There are many DEA models for ranking decision making units (DMUs) that are applicable for selecting the best sustainable suppliers. This paper presents a new DEA model for ranking DMUs (suppliers) based on a modification of context-dependent DEA models. Using the concept of attractiveness and progress for each supplier, this paper suggests a new DEA ranking approach. The proposed method is able to rank all efficient and inefficient suppliers. A case study demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed method. Our proposed method is used to determine the most sustainable suppliers of Sazeh Gostare Saipa Company. There are fourteen active suppliers for Sazeh Gostare Saipa Co., and results show that Hydraulic Structures Engineering Services is the most sustainable supplier.