A Multiple Criteria Decision Making Approach to Achieving Sustainable Supply Chain in Fashion Industry

Liang Yiying

Abstract

With increasing globalization and international cooperation, there is higher intensity on supply chain management. The importance of sustainability management across the supply chain has been putting increasing emphasis within many companies and various industries. Therefore, organizations and companies are advocated to implement effective and integrated sustainable supply chain management initiatives to improve their operational and economic performance while minimize the unnecessary damage to the environmental and maintain the social reputation. The thesis aims to develop an effective monitoring and evaluating model for the company, three major dimensions which include environmental, economic and social sustainability draws a framework that assists to assess the performance of the supply chain and the effectiveness of the improvement measurement adopted. In order to construct the effective multiple criteria decision making model, both Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Analytical Network Process (ANP) are utilized to construct the model. Companies may hold their own preference on the selection of suitable approach to evaluate the supply chain performance. Therefore, a detailed procedure convert the AHP model into an ANP model is proposed in this paper which facilitates the company to easily adopt the preferable approach. The model is specifically designed for fashion industry and can be modified and applied to other industries of interest. As the results, “Reverse Logistics” appears to be the optimal solution in the AHP model while “Socially Leagile Supply Chain” holds the highest priority rating in the ANP model.