Assessing the competitive priorities within sustainable supply chain management under uncertainty

Sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) is driving firms to extend their social, economic and environmental efforts across their supply chain. Competitive priorities are a strategic integration in SSCM and thus to firm performance. However, the literature has not thoroughly examined the hierarchical structure among the competitive priorities and SSCM under uncertainty. This study adapts a hierarchical structure and linguistic preferences to identify the competitive priorities under SSCM in electronic focal manufacturing firms in Taiwan. This study formed an expert team with industrial experience and proposed to apply interval-valued triangular fuzzy numbers to represent the linguistic preferences and used multi-criteria decision making to assess the hierarchical structure in identifying the ranking of competitive priorities and the tradeoffs. Specifically, the result found that innovation is a top priority for all SSCM aspects. Likewise, businesses should be aware of suppliers, customers and dependability aspects. The implications and conclusions are discussed. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.