Sustainable supply chains in the Indian context: An integrative decision-making model

Abstract

Sustainability is gaining importance in the Indian manufacturing industries, as there are increasing considerations from stakeholders for resource utilization and for reducing ecological impacts. Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM) can resolve many environmental management problems along with the gain of several competitive advantages for future. We formulate in this research, an integrative decision-making model for SSCM in the Indian context, which considers several strategies, interfaces, and regulations for sustainability along with the attributes contributing to each. A network model is constructed from an initial flow model and the weightings for factors were calculated using the method of paired comparison by the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Later, Analytic Network Process (ANP) has been employed for the comparison of alternative schemes for selection of a particular SSCM strategy into implementation. We assess two alternative schemes in practice for sustainability and from the results; we observe that Scheme 2 excels Scheme 1, considering sustainability capabilities. Also, from the factor weightings, we observe that standardization of nature-friendly (NF) technologies and green segment size emerges as important factors for the case supply chain. A comparison of the results from AHP and ANP is conducted with other popular multi-criteria decision-making techniques, TOPSIS and VIKOR and the results were analyzed. Also, we conduct sensitivity analysis of the results. The implications of the study are in a direction to aid the managerial decision-making process, through effectively comparing various schemes to implementation for their sustainability capabilities.