۱- Introduction

۲- Literature review

۳- Gresilient supplier selection: Research methodology

۴- Application and results

۵- Conclusions: Towards gresilient sourcing

References

Abstract

The vast majority of current literature handle supplier selection problem considering green and resilience aspects, bifurcately. But green supply chain performance is subject to disruption by internal /or external events. This initiates the need for a merged management approach to establish green and resilient supply chains, that we hereby present it as “gresilient” supply chain management. At the institutional level, the integration of measures of these two paradigms into supply chain processes frets substantial management challenges. This research intends to overcome some of these challenges in exploring, identifying and quantifying resiliency and greenness performance in supplier selection context. To this end, this work aims to: (1) explore and analyse the need and complementarities for or between resiliency and greenness in supply chain context; (2) identify the criteria of greenness and resiliency (a new framework for resilient supplier was developed in considering criteria of development, agility, robustness, sensing and flexibility (DARSF) into a unified framework; (3) quantify the gresilience performance measures by proposing a quantitative approach to evaluate the relative importance of the ‘gresilience’ criteria and suppliers’ gresilience performance via multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) algorithms. The main findings are: (i) a holistic gresilient supplier evaluation framework; and (ii) a user-friendly decision-making tool to gauge gresilience performance of suppliers. This research provides them with a clear insight towards gresilient advantages in today’ highly competitive business. This research bridges the literature gap in addressing the supplier selection problem from resiliency and greenness perspectives, jointly.

Introduction

In the last two decades, the business has experienced several developments and changes that make firms increasingly encounter new challenges such as globalization. Hence, the market is becoming highly challenging and competitive, and thus modern supply chain management should be accomplished to adopt these changes. Supplier assessment/selection is a vital decision among the activities of supply chain management (Damert et al., 2018 and Tseng et al., 2019). Where enterprises have become highly willing to improve sourcing in attaining a pool of robust suppliers towards a competitive industry. This is relied on the fact that purchasing dominates a share of 40 %–۷۰% out of total cost, and so it has a significant impact on the price and superiority of products (Dyer and Singh, 1998). In the supplier selection process, decision makers (in the purchasing team) find, assess, select and contract suppliers. As mentioned previously, this process poses a significant share (i.e., an average of 55%) of an organization’s financial assets. Organizations hereby seek benefits in signing with suppliers to present high performance in return. Arguably, the core of this activity is based on supplier performance measures that is normally determined vis-à-vis several criteria; further details on supplier assessment process is presented in Section 2.4. Traditionally, purchasing costs, products quality and lead time are among the most popular criteria in supplier assessment (Chai and Ngai, 2020; Guarnieri and Trojan, 2019; Mohammed, 2019 and Ho et al., 2010). This was based on a previous study presented. Arguably, the latter presented the first thorough overview for supplier assessment criteria. The author reported a list of 23 criteria in addition to its importance. Sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) was released to the field of operations and supply chain management by consolidating sustainable goals growth and SCM (Nujoom et al., 2019 & Nujoom et al., 2018a). Since then, the niche of SSCM is gaining a growing attention (Maditati et al., 2018; Ghadimi et al., 2019; Nujoom et al., 2016; Nujoom et al., 2018b and Jakhar et al., 2018). SSCM can be presented as “the integration of supply chain management activities through improved supply chain relationships to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage” Handfield and Nichols (1999). Supplier development, with a focus on sustainable development goals, plays a significant role towards SSCM advantages (Mohammed, 2019).