Supplier selection to support environmental sustainability: the stratified BWM TOPSIS method

Organisations need to develop long-term strategies to ensure they incorporate innovation for environmental sustainability (IES) to remain competitive in the market. This can be challenging given the high level of uncertainty regarding the future (e.g., following the COVID pandemic). Supplier selection is an important decision that organisations make and can be designed to support IES. While the literature provides various criteria in the field of IES strategies, it does not identify the criteria which can be utilised to assist organisations in their supplier selection decisions. Moreover, the literature in this field does not consider uncertainty related to the occurrence of possible future events which may influence the importance of these criteria. To address this gap, this paper develops a novel criteria decision framework to assist supplier evaluation in organisations, taking into consideration different events that may occur in the future. The framework that combines three decision-making methods: the stratified multi-criteria decision-making method, best worst method, and technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution. The framework, proposed in this paper, can also be adopted to enable effective and sustainable decision making under uncertainty in various fields.