Green supplier evaluation and selection for a furniture sales company

Abstract

This paper proposes a supplier evaluation method for a furniture sales company in China that focuses on the evaluation process and sustainability of business operation. Firstly, we have arranged a meeting with experts from various fields to gather information concerning evaluation problems and choices of evaluation indicators. We then go through the literature in the field of supplier evaluations to create a new green supplier evaluation indicator system comprising of 5 first-level and 19 second-level evaluation indicators. Once selected, the Fuzzy-entropy-TOPSIS approach has been adopted for the evaluation of 13 suppliers via MATLAB. We find that, among these suppliers, S1 and S11 are the best suppliers in terms of greenness, quality, and flexibility to meet the case study company’s sustainability and greenness needs. We also conduct a sensitivity analysis to verify objectivity and stability of the Fuzzy-entropy-TOPSIS approach by changing the subjective weight.