An integrated, multi-criteria approach based on environmental, economic, social, and competency criteria for supplier selection

Abstract

Supplier selection (SS), which is a critical stage of supply chain management (SCM), is no longer evaluated solely from the perspective of traditional criteria, due to increasing environmental problems and ethical concerns. In this study, a multidimensional approach including environmental, economic, social, and competency concepts was proposed to evaluate SS, and an integrated approach based on Best Worst Method (BWM) and fuzzy TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese of Interactive and Multi-criteria Decision Making) techniques was developed. In the developed approach, BWM was used to first obtain the importance level of the criteria and then to rank the suppliers with fuzzy TODIM. The proposed approach was tested on an automotive company in Turkey. The outcomes of the analysis revealed that the most important main criteria for SS are economic (0.377) and environmental criteria (0.290). In addition, the sub-criteria with the highest criteria weight were listed as product cost (0.120), on-time delivery (0.112), quality control (0.094), logistics costs (0.069), management commitment (0.054), and flexibility (0.054). The results of this study offer theoretical and practical outputs to companies that want to improve their SS process, selection of suppliers, and contributions of the researchers working on the topic.