Supplier’s goal setting considering sustainability: An uncertain dynamic Data Envelopment Analysis based benchmarking model

Application of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) in the Selection of Sustainable Suppliers: A Review and Bibliometric Analysis

The supplier selection process is a strategic decision-making process that influences the company’s sustainability. Lately, the sustainability concept has been highlighted as an organization’s source of success and profitability. Therefore, the selection of a sustainable supplier has become an imperative for organizations and is the focus of this manuscript. Suppliers are key stakeholders in the supply chain, and their proper selection is a key factor in a successful and sustainable supply chain. For this reason, it is crucial to determine how and which methods are mostly used by companies when choosing sustainable suppliers with the aim of examining whether the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) contributes to the same. This article is the first to present a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of 87 articles dealing with the application of DEA in the sustainable supplier selection in the period 2010–2022, with the application of the keywords “Data Envelopment Analysis”, “Supplier”, and “Sustainable” in Scopus and Web of Science databases. The main goal of this manuscript is to explore the applications of DEA in a sustainable supplier selection and to provide an analysis and visualization of bibliometric data to reveal the annual trends of published articles in this area, the top contributing journals, the most cited papers, the most contributing authors, citations, affiliations, and countries’ analysis, and an in-depth keyword visualization analysis. The findings of this study provide valuable insights and emphasize the ever-growing trend toward the selection of sustainable partners and suppliers in business using DEA methodology. Notably, this work shows the applicability and efficacy of DEA in specialized areas of supply chain management and should contribute to the construction of an overview of the existing literature on DEA studies regarding the process of selection of sustainable suppliers in supply chain management as well as stimulate the interest in the topic. This article gives an overview of a research field that is actually insufficiently explored through the scientific literature and presents a wide area and guidelines for future work.

Research on Sustainable Supplier Selection Based on the Rough DEMATEL and FVIKOR Methods

In competitive global markets, sustainable suppliers are critical success factors for sustainable supply chain operations. Sustainable supplier selection must be based on a complex network of numerous indicators and experts’ fuzzy linguistic terms. Considering the correlation between the evaluation criteria and the ambiguity of the criteria values, this paper proposes combining the rough DEMATEL method and the fuzzy VIKOR (FVIKOR) method to solve sustainable supplier selection problem. We determine 15 sustainable supplier evaluation criteria from economic, environmental and social dimensions. We also apply the rough DEMATEL method to determine the weight of evaluation indicators that are interrelated or even conflicting and use the FVIKOR method to determine supplier rankings by converting the fuzzy linguistic terms into precise information. The practicability of the proposed method is verified by an example of sustainable supplier selection.