Designing A Sustainable Supply Chain Through Integrated QFD Approach: An Application in the Automotive Supply Industry

Abstract

Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM) provides material, information and financial capital flows by cooperation between stakeholders and ensures managing all activities, from strategic level to operational level, in an economic, environmental and socially balanced manner. As stated in the literature companies can get better market positon globally through SSCM. This study aims to provide managers a practical approach to SSCM which is often conceptually adressed, and develop a roadmap for managers. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Quality Function Deployment (QFD) methods, which are multi-criteria decision making techniques, were used during this study in a company operating in the automotive supplier industry. Company’s sustainability priorities were listed according to their importance level with AHP. Later we tried to determine the company supply chain’s basic and sub-applications that should be focused in order to achieve these priorities by using QFD technique. And finally we determined the first three important applications that should focused on to have a sustainable supply chain: “Product Recovery”, “Use of Multiple Transportation Methods in Supply Chain” and “Categorization of Suppliers as Primary-Secondary Suppliers”.

Keywords

• sustainability
• sustainable supply chain management
• quality function deployment (qfd)
• analytical hierarchy process (ahp)