Green sourcing in the era of industry 4.0: towards green and digitalized competitive advantages

Abstract

PurposeIn the last decade, sustainable sourcing decision has gained tremendous attention due to the increasing governmental restrictions and public attentiveness. This decision involves diverse sets of classical and environmental parameters, which are originated from a complex, ambiguous and inconsistent decision-making environment. Arguably, supply chain management is fronting the next industrial revolution, which is named industry 4.0, due to the fast advance of digitalization. Considering the latter's rapid growth, current supplier selection models are, or it will, inefficient to assign the level of priority of each supplier among a set of suppliers, and therefore, more advanced models merging “recipes” of sustainability and industry 4.0 ingenuities are required. Yet, no research work found towards a digitalized, along with sustainability's target, sourcing.Design/methodology/approachA new framework for green and digitalized sourcing is developed. Thereafter, a hybrid decision-making approach is developed that utilizes (1) fuzzy preference programming (FPP) to decide the importance of one supplier attribute over another and (2) multi-objective optimization on the basis of ratio analysis (MOORA) to prioritize suppliers based on fuzzy performance rating. The proposed approach is implemented in consultation with the procurement department of a food processing company willing to develop a greener supply chain in the era of industry 4.0.FindingsThe proposed approach is capable to recognize the most important evaluation criteria, explain the ambiguity of experts' expressions and having better discrimination power to assess suppliers on operational efficiency and environmental and digitalization criteria, and henceforth enhances the quality of the sourcing process. Sensitivity analysis is performed to help managers for model approval. Moreover, this work presents the first attempt towards green and digitalized supplier selection. It paves the way towards further development in the modelling and optimization of sourcing in the era of industry 4.0.Originality/valueCompetitive supply chain management needs efficient purchasing and production activities since they represent its core, and this arises the necessity for a strategic adaptation and alignment with the requirement of industry 4.0. The latter implies alterations in the avenue firms operate and shape their activities and processes. In the context of supplier selection, this would involve the way supplier assessed and selected. This work is originally initiated based on a joint collaboration with a food company. A hybrid decision-making approach is proposed to evaluate and select suppliers considering operational efficiency, environmental criteria and digitalization initiatives towards digitalized and green supplier selection (DG-SS). To this end, supply chain management in the era of sustainability and digitalization are discussed.

Strategic sourcing model for green supply chain management: an insight into automobile manufacturing units in India

“…Hatami-Marbini et al (2020) developed a unified structure for GSS practices across the agri-food supply chain on the basis of strategic planning to support supplier relationship management under uncertainty. Fallahpour et al (2021) developed a new framework of GSS to optimize digitalized sourcing in the era of "Industry 4.0." Min and Choi (2020) identified variables that either promote or inhibit the successful adoption of green sourcing strategy and sought to determine the effects of green sourcing practices on the SS process, waste management, and regulatory compliance of Korean-based manufacturing firms.…”

SDG-Oriented Supply Chains: Business Practices for Procurement and Distribution

“…Since raw materials and components are purchased from suppliers, their activities affect SC sustainability [3,33]. Many researchers have focused on supplier selection, proposing sustainability criteria to assess sustainability levels [34] and mainly focusing on environmental issues associated with the concept of green sourcing and green SC [35][36][37][38]. Relatively few papers have considered social criteria [39].…”

Leagile and sustainable supplier selection problem in the Industry 4.0 era: a case study of the medical devices using hybrid multi-criteria decision making tool

“…It should be noted that the authors developed the interval type 2 fuzzy TOPSIS to rank the potential suppliers. Fallahpour et al (2021c) proposed a hybrid approach based on fuzzy preference programming and MOORA methods to investigate the green sourcing problem considering the I4.0 dimensions. Tas and Akcan (2021) presented an integrated fuzzy-Swara-Bwm method to study agile and green SSP considering the I4.0 dimensions.…”

“…On the other side, the main motivation for considering the leanness, agility, sustainability, and I4.0 aspects is their importance in the supply chain management problem. In the literature, there are several works that studied the sustainable SSP (for example, Sen et al (2018), Hendiani et al (2020a, b), Beiki et al (2021), Tong et al (2022), Salimian et al (2022)), the lean and agile SSP (for example, Alimardani et al (2013), Abdollahi et al (2015), Li et al (2020), Foladi (2020, Alamroshan et al (2022)), and the I4.0-based SSP (for example, Özbek and Yildiz (2020); Çalık (2021); Fallahpour et al (2021b), Fallahpour et al (2021c). However, there is no research that considers all of these crucial aspects, simultaneously.…”