Measuring social compliance performance in the global sustainable supply chain: an AHP approach

Abstract Sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) has increasingly become an important operation task for business organizations in recent decades in orderto be positioned competitively within industry supply chain management. The economic, environmental, and social goals come from the threemajor dimensions of SSCM and they are derived fromcustomer and stakeholder requirements. The social compliance program (SCP)is a basic requirement established and aimsto evaluate suppliers and or business organizations’ SSCM implementation as foundation.An empirical checklist used to commonly use as a tool to evaluate suppliers’ performance in the field of social compliance, but the argument is that it is insufficientand approaches ambiguity when examiningthebusiness efforts of sustainable decisions. Today, for instance, less in-depth theoretical data are qualitativelyutilized for suppliers’ social compliance performanceevaluation. This paper represents a case study to illustrate the proposed SCP criteria used for evaluating and selecting sustainable global suppliers is practicable in field of meeting social compliance perspective. This study adopts the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methodology by using a multi-criteria decision framework to measure the SCP within SSCM. For comparison, we collected the relevant factors and alternatives through aquestionnaire collected from 137 surveys that were submitted by various business units from a global sports brand company, whose suppliers are located in China, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia. It appears that, in general, the concept of management involvement, the launch of a management system, communication within collaboration, a training mechanism, and a transparent attitude and performance action are critical elements that lead business decisions and supply chain sustainability. We present reliable factors thatcontribute to the framework decision model and which are applicable to business entities for effectively evaluatingand selectingsustainable suppliers. Moreover, we find that the value mechanism applied to suppliers can also enhance the motivation of the business model and to meet the goal dimension of SSCM.