Strategy development for supplier selection process with smart and sustainable criteria in fuzzy environment

Abstract

Supply chain management has been mutated to adapt to the developments over the last couple of decades. Smart paradigms, one of today's most significant paradigm shifts, occur in almost every moment of our daily lives. On the other hand, the importance of sustainability has increased more and more, reducing available resources of our world and increasing the effect of climate change and environmental degradation. In this context, this study it is aimed to develop a strategy for the supplier selection process by investigating the impacts of using different fuzzy environments and different decision-making methods on smart and sustainable supplier selection. The applicability of the proposed approaches has been demonstrated by a supplier selection case study of Company V, an automobile spare parts manufacturer. With the comparative analyzes made, it has been observed that although different fuzzy environments or varying decision-making methods in supplier selection create minor differences in criterion weights, it does not make any difference in supplier evaluations. For this reason, it has been concluded that it does not affect supplier selection. In addition, it was investigated how different supplier distributions in the strategies developed with the scenario analyzes affected each purpose of Company V, and an increase was observed in purchasing costs, carbon emission rates, quality rates, and on-time delivery rates when their importance levels increased from sustainable to smart criteria. To the authors' best knowledge, strategy development for the smart and sustainable criteria-based supplier selection process is a pioneering work in this field as it has never been studied before in the literature. © 2022