A practical method to measure sustainability performance of supply chains with incomplete information

Abstract

Measuring and managing supply chain sustainability is essential for achieving sustainable development goals. Existing methods fail to assess all three sustainability aspects across supply chain partners when measuring sustainability performance. Hence, this paper aims to develop a new method that evaluates environmental, social, and economic sustainability aspects across the entire supply chain, from raw material providers to consumers to reverse logistics providers. By combining content analysis, expert’s evaluation, fuzzy Shannon’s Entropy, and fuzzy TOPSIS, we develop a novel approach to measure the end-to-end supply chain sustainability performance. Utilizing data from six sustainability reports published by large pharmaceutical companies we demonstrate the practicality and ease of application of the proposed solution. Results show that the developed method can be used by managers and policymakers to benchmark supply chains and evaluate the effectiveness of adopted sustainable supply chain initiatives. Additionally, the sensitivity analysis indicates that the results obtained from the proposed method are promising and robust. Researchers and practitioners can use the proposed approach to measure sustainability, increase their value chain transparency, and identify potential environmental and social issues across their supply chains, leading to more informed decision-making about the implementation of sustainability practices across inter-organizational processes.