Sustainable Supplier Selection in Agri-Food Supply Chain Management

Nesrin Ada

doi:10.33889/ijmems.2022.7.1.008

Abstract

In recent times, sustainability of supply chains becomes the most interested subject by customers, firms, government bodies, academia, and suppliers as the environmental resources reveal as the most valuable and limited asset for human beings. One of the most important elements determining the performance of sustainable agri-food supply chain business is supplier’s commitment. A mainly inspiring feature in this domain is the wide range of factors influencing supplier selection decision-making process in Triple Bottom Line context must be analyzed. However, it is not easy to completely integrate and measure majority of these factors in a simple optimization model. Therefore, this paper starts with a comprehensive review of literature about supplier selection for sustainable supply chains (SSCs) development. Afterwards, a new two-steps hybrid solution method is suggested. In initial step, a set of criteria for supplier selection process is analyzed built on Fuzzy Analytic Network Process (FANP). The result of the first step is fed in to the second step of the analysis to design a model with multiple objectives for selection process of supplier using fuzzy VIKOR. All three dimensions of sustainability; specifically, factors such as weather, water and soil footprint, energy and material consumption, employment, social services and finally financial performance of supply chain are considered concurrently. The suggested approach generates a comprehensive model to help supply chain managers in supplier selection process. Numerical analysis is completed via exploiting data from a Turkish agri-food company case for validating effectiveness, also and success of the proposed solution. Final analytical results of the analysis provide valuable business policy oriented, operational and practical insights on the influence of economic, environmental, and social sustainability for enhanced supplier relationship management module in sustainable supply chain structure. Moreover, by tracking environmental impact indicators such as, emission and pollution rates, footprint rates, against social and cost indicators it would be possible to perform tradeoff analysis for giving more sustainable decisions on new supply chain investments.

Highlights

Currently it is possible to observe the strong pressure from all stakeholders such as customers, government, policy makers, and non-government organizations and especially suppliers of agrifood supply chains to deal with sustainability as a result of increasing financial, environmental, and social distresses and increased strategic importance of food production and consumption (Barbosa, 2021)
An sustainable supply chains (SSCs) can be defined as a system in which organizational structure, managerial policies and all managerial functions, activities, operations, logistics in supply chain management (SCM) are performed through circularity and sustainable development (Ciccullo et al, 2021)
It is an important trend to take into consideration sustainability in agri-food supply chain

Summary

Introduction

It is possible to observe the strong pressure from all stakeholders such as customers, government, policy makers, and non-government organizations and especially suppliers of agrifood supply chains to deal with sustainability as a result of increasing financial, environmental, and social distresses and increased strategic importance of food production and consumption (Barbosa, 2021). It is essential to focus on sustainability dimensions for agri-food supply chains In this context, broad range of effective sustainability factors need to be considered with a fully integrated multi-objective model for supplier selection process. Managers of supply chain systems prefer to consider economic, social, and environmental factors together within supplier relationship, network design, logistics and customer relationship modules of the whole supply chain Such an approach transforms the solution method of decision-making problem into a hybrid model. Mishra et al (2021) focused on impacts of disruptions and resilience on agri-food supply chains From another point of view, Mahmoudi et al (2021) addressing green supplier selection by considering the ordinal priority approach and grey systems.

C54 Compatibility to

Findings

Discussion and Conclusion