Integrating sustainability into supplier selection with analytical hierarchy process and improved grey relational analysis: a case of telecom industry

Supplier selection is one of the critical problems in supply chain systems. Within the last decades, by the emergence of sustainability concept, companies have been motivated to enhance their supplier's sustainability and move toward sustainable development. This paper proposes a structured and integrated decision model for evaluating sustainable suppliers in the context of telecom industry by combining analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and improved grey relational analysis (IGRA) approaches. The proposed model employs AHP for calculating sustainability criteria weights and IGRA for ranking suppliers. Moreover, a sensitivity analysis is also performed to demonstrate the robustness of the model. In this research, the sustainable supplier selection problem of the telecom industry in the southern part of Iran was investigated, showing the effectiveness and applicability of this proposed integrated approach.