Green Supplier Selection in the Automobile Industry: A Comprehensive Framework for Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis

Abstract This research proposes a comprehensive framework to evaluate green suppliers. A real-world green supplier selection (GSS) problem is considered in which three India-based automobile manufacturing organizations, namely Supplier 1, Supplier 2, and Supplier 3 are selected for the evaluation. Initially, fourteen important criteria are extracted from literature and experts’ suggestion, which encompasses both the environmental, economic, and operational aspects of sustainability. Firstly, data is collected through the development of a questionnaire, formation of an expert committee, and carrying out interviews with the experts. Secondly, an integrated multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM)-multivariate approach is proposed in which the item analysis is used to examine the internal consistency of data, the principal component analysis (PCA) is used to calculate the weights of the parameters. Finally; the simple additive weighting (SAW) method is used to determine the performance scores of the case organizations for ranking and benchmarking purpose. The result reveals that Supplier 3 is the benchmark supplier as it gains the highest performance score. The result also recommends that collaboration with suppliers for green purchasing is the most influential parameter for GSS. This research may assist policymakers to strategically select the optimum green supplier for sustainability.