An improved approach for sustainable outsourcing strategy

Abstract

In the modern business world, the trend that calls for a harmonious coexistence between economic development and the natural environment is growing ever stronger. Under such global context, the sustainability of a company has become more and more emphasized. As a crucial part of the supply chain management, the outsourcing process should as well be able to deal with such concerns under the guidance of a sustainable outsourcing strategy. In this report, a weighted scoreboard model (WSB) is developed for the evaluation and selection of suppliers when doing outsourcing. An equivalent carbon dioxide emission index is introduced as the unified criterion for measuring the sustainability of an outsourcing process. A brief case study is then conducted to illustrate the application and validity of the proposed model. The numerical results have shown that carbon emission index works as an informative representation of the sustainability measurement and bringing this new criterion into the outsourcing evaluation process alters the final ranking of suppliers.