Evaluating Supplier Appraisement Index in Green Supply Chain using grey numbers

Abstract

With growing worldwide awareness of environmental protection, green production has become an important issue for almost every manufacturer sector which will influence the sustainability of a manufacturer in the long term. A performance evaluation system for green suppliers is indeed necessary in order to determine the suitability of suppliers to cooperate with the firm effectively. Related research on performance evaluation and/or selection of suppliers are seemed abundant for traditional supply chain management, however, those that concern environmental issues thereby incorporating environmental performance criteria are rather limited. To this end, the present research aims to develop an efficient measurement index evaluation system towards assessing suppliers’ green performance practices. In order to tackle incompleteness and imprecision arising from assigning appropriateness rating as well as priority weights against subjective performance criteria, use of grey numbers has been proposed in this reporting. A case study reflects effectiveness of exploring grey relation theory in the context of green supplier evaluation