Developing an assessment framework for managing sustainability programs: A Analytic Network Process approach

• The decision-making process can be used to guide enterprises’ TBL strategies.
• We identify seventeen survey items for the proposed decision-making process.
• Fuzzy method is adopted to express experts’ judgments.
• We employ the ANP to guide managers on the initiation of supplier assessment.
• Our model helps managers to focus resource allocation for sustainable development.

This paper applies an Analytic Network Process (ANP) to supplier selection at a Taiwanese Electronics Company. The selection process is based on the Triple Bottom Line (TBL). It shows that the use of ANP helps to capture the imprecision in human judgment while TBL enables the consideration of social development, environmental protection, and economic development issues. With TBL, a holistic view of the company is taken in the decision making process. A framework is developed to enable general application of ANP. A case study using ten company executives from an anonymous Taiwanese company is used to illustrate the framework, and also to identify the key factors in supplier selection. Our results, which are consistent with other research findings, show that product design for sustainability and green supply chain management are the most important factors in supplier selection. This is also consistent with our earlier results in the paper which showed environmental protection has the highest priority index among the three components of TBL, namely social development, environmental protection, and economic development.