Improving corporate sustainable development by using an interdependent closed-loop hierarchical structure

•A corporate sustainable development is lacking in the previous literatures.•A measurement model is proposed with reliability and validity, and we have confirmed the hierarchical structure.•A hybrid method addresses the interdependent closed-loop hierarchical structure.•The results indicate the improving attributes of corporate sustainable development.

Firms act to reduce environmental impact and contribute to improving the quality of the environment. However, corporate sustainability is lacking with regard to development in practice, and the decision-making process is absent from a hierarchical structure that has complicated interdependent relationships among the attributes. However, the elimination of less important criteria from various measures and the criteria that are encountered remain with respect to both qualitative and quantitative measures. Thus, this study proposes to develop a corporate sustainability model for a focal firm in supply chain networks using the fuzzy Delphi method, interval-valued triangular fuzzy numbers and analytical network process method. The findings are as follows: the firm focused on the environmental operation design aspect, and it ranked five criteria, which included (1) decreasing the generation of toxic and hazardous matter; (2) environmental certificates; (3) service cycle processing time; (4) reducing the service costs, i.e., the service costs as a percentage of the revenue; and (5) the service output per hour/facility utilization. Sensitivity analysis is performed on the coordination of green design in operations and products, which indicated the corporate sustainable development criteria for the next frontier. The implications and conclusions are discussed.