Supplier evaluation and management considering greener production in manufacturing industry

For the manufacturing industry under the Industry 4.0 Environment, low carbon emissions and environmental protection have been a main point of the industry development due to more and more production accidents caused by environmental issues. However, there is a paucity of systematic evaluation systems considering greener production performance for evaluating and managing suppliers during production processes in the manufacturing industry. By incorporating indices related to greener production, this study constructed a novel framework with an evaluation index system that suits the operation status of suppliers and the enterprise' management mode. Based on the new and systematic index system, a three-phase model was proposed to evaluate and manage suppliers in a hierarchical and orderly manner. An analytic hierarchy process method and an entropy weight method were hybridised to determine the weights of evaluation indices. The grading and ranking of suppliers were conducted by adopting grey clustering and grey relational analysis. A case study with real-world data from a leading car manufacturing company was employed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework and model. Compared to the old evaluation system, 80% of suppliers in the new evaluation system have different evaluation results. The company's average performance in greener production is improved by 6.5%. The control performance of pollutants and effluents is elevated by 12.5%. Scenario analysis was also conducted to investigate how evaluation results change with weights for greener production. The company is suggested to keep long-term cooperation with the two suppliers identified as the requirement for greener production increases. The proposed framework and model have potential applicability in other industries.