Development of sustainable supplier selection index for new product development using multi criteria decision making

In view of the growing environmental consciousness among product users, the issue of product sustainability is one of the challenging tasks being faced by product designers, manufacturers, environmentalists and, decision makers in a new product development (NPD) environment. From sustainability perspective, selecting the right supplier from and among the pool of suppliers is an uphill task in the present day decision making environment. This article presents a framework for supplier selection from sustainability perspective. Attributes of supplier are first of all identified. The interrelationships among various identified attributes and their degree is also established. Based on the degree of interrelationships, a structure called sustainable supplier selection attributes graph is synthesized. To analyze this structure, a matrix is developed. This leads to the development of an index called sustainable supplier selection index. Various potential suppliers are analyzed from sustainability perspective and thus the best supplier can be selected. The framework proposed in this research article will enable product designers, manufacturers, environmentalists and, decision makers in effective decision making, wherever the issue of supplier selection is involved in a NPD environment. Two examples have been considered here in the present work to support and validate the proposed framework. Example one is to illustrate the proposed framework and, second example is for validation purpose. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.