Considering strategic targets and fierce competition, high‐efficiency supply chain management (SCM) and selection strategy has a significant impact on the automotive manufacturing industry to improve its competitive advantage and economic benefit. However, the selection process of supply chain is often inevitably affected by multiperspective factors, e.g., societal and economic properties. Thus, multicriteria decision‐making as an effective method is needed. This article establishes a systematic hierarchical structure of multiperspective indices for SCM of automotive manufacturing industry including economic, environmental, societal, and technical properties. An integrated method that combines gray relational analysis and analytic hierarchy process is applied to select the optimal pattern of supply chain. An empirical case about three types of supply chain for automotive manufacturing industry is applied to test the effectiveness of multicriteria decision‐making method and the hierarchical structure. In addition, a comparison with other methods and a sensitivity analysis are conducted to validate the reliability of this research. The results show this method can be effectively used in the decision‐making process of SCM in the automotive manufacturing industry. © 2019 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.