A fuzzy multi criteria approach for measuring sustainability performance of a supplier based on triple bottom line approach

Sustainable supply chain management has received much attention from practitioners and scholars over the past decade owing to the significant attention given by consumers, profit and not-for-profit organizations, local communities, legislation and regulation to environmental, social and corporate responsibility. Sustainable supply chain initiatives like supplier environmental and social collaboration can play a significant role in achieving the "triple bottom line" of social, environmental, and economic benefits. Supplier selection plays an important role in the management of a supply chain. Traditionally, organizations consider criteria such as price, quality, flexibility, etc. when evaluating supplier performance. While the articles on the selection and evaluation of suppliers are abundant, those that consider sustainability issues are rather limited. This paper explores sustainable supply chain initiatives and examines the problem of identifying an effective model based on the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) approach (economic, environmental, and social aspects) for supplier selection operations in supply chains by presenting a fuzzy multi criteria approach. We use triangular fuzzy numbers to express linguistic values of experts' subjective preferences. Qualitative performance evaluation is performed by using fuzzy numbers for finding criteria weights and then fuzzy TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) is proposed for finding the ranking of suppliers. The proposed approach is illustrated by an example. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.