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Green supplier appraisement in fuzzy environment

Nitin Kumar Sahu (Mechanical Engineering Department, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, Rourkela, India)
Saurav Datta (Mechanical Engineering Department, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, Rourkela, India)
Siba Sankar Mahapatra (Mechanical Engineering Department, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, Rourkela, India)

Benchmarking: An International Journal

ISSN: 1463-5771

Article publication date: 29 April 2014

793

Abstract

Purpose

In recent years, stimulated environmental awareness (green consciousness) has favored the emergence of the green supply chain paradigm. Therefore, apart from traditional supplier selection criterions, green criteria are necessarily to be incorporated in the supplier selection problem. In this context, the present study aims to highlight an efficient supplier appraisement platform by considering green performance criteria, in fuzzy environment.

Design/methodology/approach

The present work exhibits an efficient fuzzy-based supplier performance assessment system using generalized trapezoidal fuzzy numbers set. A fuzzy overall evaluation index has been estimated towards assessing suppliers' green performance extent, thus facilitating supplier appraisement cum selection decision-making.

Findings

The proposed method has been found efficient for solving the group decision-making problem under uncertain environment due to vagueness, ambiguity associated with decision-makers' subjective judgment. The proposed appraisement platform has been explored by an Indian automobile part manufacturing company at eastern part of India. Suppliers have been evaluated individually to check their performance level with respect to green attributes. Apart from estimating overall performance metric, the model presented here can identify ill-performing areas that necessitate future attention.

Originality/value

The major contributions of this work have been summarized as follows: Development and implementation of an efficient decision-making procedural hierarchy to support suppliers' green performance extent evaluation. An overall performance metric has been introduced. Concept of generalized trapezoidal fuzzy numbers has been efficiently explored to facilitate such an appraisement cum selection decision-making. The appraisement index system has been extended with the capability to search ill-performing areas that require future progress.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support provided by Professor Gunasekaran, Editor-in-Chief, Benchmarking: An International Journal and the anonymous reviewer(s) to improve quality of presentation of this reporting.

Citation

Kumar Sahu, N., Datta, S. and Sankar Mahapatra, S. (2014), "Green supplier appraisement in fuzzy environment", Benchmarking: An International Journal, Vol. 21 No. 3, pp. 412-429. https://doi.org/10.1108/BIJ-06-2012-0042

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2014, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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