Exploring of Sustainable Supplier Selection

Dear Colleagues,

The topic of sustainable supplier selection represents a very up-to-date and important field, especially in the context of supply chain management in general. Nowadays, considering the evident changes in climate as well as the recent geopolitical and social situation, the topic of supplier selection has been evolving toward a more green and sustainable direction. The term “sustainable” in sustainable supplier selection indicates harmonizing various social, environmental, and economic aspects. This enforces a completely new look on the subject, incorporating multiple, often conflicting, aims as well as facing multiple challenges. Simple indices focused on maximizing benefits are no longer sufficient for sustainable supplier selection and are being superseded by multifactor methods and approaches.

Although some considerable research has already been done on the topic of sustainable supplier selection, state-of-the-art reviews in the scope of sustainable supplier selection show that there is still much to explore, including various quantitative and qualitative methods in supplier selection, supply chain creation, comparison of suppliers, efficiency measurements, incorporation of modern research tools such as approaches on the fuzzy set theory, or temporal data evaluation and aggregation. Moreover, the dynamic growth of methods from the multicriteria decision making domain creates additional opportunities to empower sustainable supplier selection with research tools such as sensitivity analysis, robustness analysis, preference modeling, and decision variants comparison. The wide range of theoretical foundations which can be used for the description and appraisal of suppliers as well as broad possibilities for practical application represents immense potential both for creating new and revisiting and extending the existing approaches.

This Special Issue will focus on exploring decision support methods and frameworks for sustainable supplier selection. We invite contributions focused on assessment theories and practical indices and frameworks for sustainable supplier evaluation, comparison, and selection. Moreover, methods oriented at various locality levels (local businesses, city-wide, nationwide, distributed entrepreneurships) and supplier types will be gladly received. Approaches utilizing multicriteria decision analysis methods are especially welcome.

M. Eng. Artur Karczmarczyk
Dr. Jarosław Wątróbski
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• sustainable supplier selection
• decision support systems
• decision support methods
• sustainability measurements
• sustainable supplier comparison