Research On The Key Issues Of Green Supplier Management

Given the rise in environmental and resource conservation importance, green supply chain management has seen growth within industry. In addition, balancing economic development and environmental development is one of the critical issues faced by managers to help organizations maintain a strategically competitive position. Green supplier management as one of important part of green supply chain is also critical issue for effective green supply chain management. Therefore, research on making the green supplier selection decision, evaluating green supplier development programs and investigating how organizations manage performance of their suppliers in green supplier management is timely and necessary. Aiming to help resolve and contribute to the knowledge around these three issues, this dissertation introduces rough set theory and grey system methodology as formal modeling tools for managerial use.The dissertation is divided into three major sections.Section 1:Sustainable supplier selection model researchUsing a foundational literature review, a sustainability factors matrix is constructed for our initial formal model.This model integrates sustainability's'triple-bottom-line'selection and performance factors.These factors include economic/business, environmental and social dimensions for decision making. Historical supplier performance and previous decisions related to these suppliers have been integrated into the decision models developed in this section of the dissertation. A rough set theoretic approach is utilized to help filter and focus the set of acceptable suppliers, which is also linked with grey relational analysis to select the best supplier. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is completed to provide theoretical and practical insights into the evaluation methodology. Part of this sensitivity analysis helps to identify and compare which selections are made when only economic factors versus a complete set of sustainability factors are used for evaluation purposes.Section 2:Analytical evaluation of green supplier development model researchIn this section, we distilled and integrated a variety of practices appearing in the supplier development and green supply chain management literature.In this evaluation we arrive at three major, not necessarily mutually exclusive, categories including green knowledge transfer and communication, investment and resource transfer, and management and organizational practices.Using these developed practices as a foundation, a formal model utilizing an'incomplete'information rough set approach, an advanced rough set theoretic technique, to evaluate the relationships between performance outcomes and various environmental supplier development practices is completed. This specific formal analytical model helps to evaluate how well specific and idiosyncratic supplier development practices are executed and to help organizations make decisions related to management issues and possible resource allocation decisions for green supplier development practices and programs.Section 3:Evaluating supplier ecological sustainable performance measuresWell managed organizations are consistently monitoring their suppliers utilizing effective performance measurement systems (PMS).Especially important is how to determine which performance measures are effectively monitoring the preferred managerial outcomest. Monitoring and managing ecological and business/economic sustainability of supply chains adds greater complexity to PMS management. In this section of the dissertation we apply a grey based neighborhood rough set approach to help manage performance measures within the broader PMS environment. Methodologically, this is the first time that grey systems theory is integrated with neighborhood rough set theory, an important and worthwhile contribution to the body of knowledge.We provide a conceptual application of the tool after introducing a variety of environmental and business performance measures for a supply chain environment.These measures are developed based on the supply chain operations reference (SCOR) model.It is also one of the first attempts at integrating SCOR dimensions with environmental dimensions for supply chain sourcing performance evaluation.In this dissertation, we use rough set theory and methodology along with sustainable factors matrix and characteristics and integrating some of the latest thoughts in supplier management and greening of supply chain to provide ample opportunity for advancement and contribution of knowledge in this field.