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International Journal of Production Research

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Greener supplier selection: state of the art and some empirical evidence
Andrea Genovese , S.C. Lenny Koh , Giuseppe Bruno & Emilio Esposito
a a a b b

University of Sheffield, Management School, Logistics and Supply Chain Management Research Centre, Sheffield, UK
b

University of Naples Federico II, Department of Engineering Management, Naples, Italy Published online: 18 Feb 2013.

To cite this article: Andrea Genovese , S.C. Lenny Koh , Giuseppe Bruno & Emilio Esposito (2013) Greener supplier selection: state of the art and some empirical evidence, International Journal of Production Research, 51:10, 2868-2886, DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2012.748224 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2012.748224

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International Journal of Production Research, 2013 Vol. 51, No. 10, 28682886, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2012.748224

Greener supplier selection: state of the art and some empirical evidence
Andrea Genovesea*, S.C. Lenny Koha, Giuseppe Brunob and Emilio Espositob
a

University of Shefeld, Management School, Logistics and Supply Chain Management Research Centre, Shefeld, UK; bUniversity of Naples Federico II, Department of Engineering Management, Naples, Italy (Received 8 July 2011; nal version received 26 November 2012) In recent years, an increasing environmental awareness has favoured the emergence of the new green supply chain paradigm; thus, also in the supplier selection problem, green criteria were incorporated. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, a careful scrutiny of the papers appearing in international scientic journals in recent years on the greener supplier selection problem is provided, highlighting utilised methodologies and current issues; second, a verication of the penetration of environmental and green criteria for the supplier selection in corporate practice is performed, using a questionnaire survey targeting the top 100 manufacturing companies operating in South Yorkshire (UK) and two in-depth interviews at large MNE rms operating in complex industries. Results show that, while interest in the literature is growing, there is little empirical evidence of the transfer of these applications into the real world, highlighting a persistent dichotomy between theory and practice. The reasons for this dichotomy are also investigated. Keywords: green supply chain; supplier selection

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1. Introduction In a competitive market, consumers demand cheaper and higher-quality products, on-time delivery, and excellent aftersale services. Therefore, companies need to cut costs while maintaining a high level of quality and after-sale services. Various studies devoted to the analysis of customersupplier relationships have highlighted that attention should focus on the management of the entire supply chain in order to improve the quality of services and products provided to the nal consumers (Ancarani 2009, Friedl and Wagner 2012). Moreover, with the trend to outsource a constantly increasing quota of the value-chain activities, purchasing decisions become crucial (Burness and Anastasiadis 2003, Gunasekaran and Irani 2010). Thus, a key role is played by the supplier-evaluation process (Saen 2007). In particular, suppliers selection has assumed a strategic role in determining large customer rms competitiveness (Kuo and Lin 2012). Consequently, customers devote more and more resources both to suppliers development programmes (Lamming, Cousins, and Notman 1996) and to early suppliers involvement (ONeal 2006). In this perspective, supplier selection has received extensive attention in the literature (de Boer, Labro, and Morlacchi 2001; de Boer and van der Wegen 2003, Ravindran et al. 2010, Bruno et al. 2012). At the same time, in recent years, an increasing environmental awareness has favoured the incorporation of green and sustainability thinking in supply chain paradigms (Cabral, Grilo, and Cruz-Machado 2012; Jain 2012; Koh et al. 2012; Kumar, Teichman, and Timpernagel 2012). Thus, green criteria have started to be considered also in the supplier selection problem (Sarkis 2003) and in managing supplier relationships (Hollos, Blome, and Foerstl 2012). Given these concurrent phenomenon, the aim of this paper is twofold. First, a careful scrutiny of the papers published on international scientic journals concerned with the greener supplier selection problem is provided, by highlighting utilised methodologies and current issues. Second, in order to assess potential gaps between literature and practice, the penetration of environmental and green criteria for the supplier selection and their incorporation in formalised methodologies in the corporate practice is veried, by undertaking a questionnaire survey targeting the Top 100 manufacturing companies operating in the South Yorkshire county (UK); moreover, in order to gain some in-depth evidence, several interviews in two large multi-national rms operating in complex industries were run. In this paper, results from both analyses are presented, thus allowing an assessment of the diffusion level of green issues in the supplier selection problem, both in the literature and in corporate practice.

*Corresponding author. Email: a.genovese@shef.ac.uk

2013 Taylor & Francis

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The remainder of this paper is organised as follows: in the next section, some denitions about green supply chain management are presented through an evolutionary perspective. This will help to understand the emergence of environmental and sustainability awareness in the supply chain management eld of study. Thereafter, an extensive survey is performed to assess the penetration and diffusion of green supply chain management issues in the supplier selection literature. Indeed, as supplier selection represents a crucial process within SCM, the emergence of green/sustainable supply chain paradigms would be expected to have favoured the development of an emerging body of literature on green/sustainability aspects in supplier selection problems. Following this, penetration and diffusion of these issues are also veried in the corporate practice, by investigating the use of greener supplier selection criteria in a wide set of rms, in order to verify the existence of any dichotomy between academic literature and corporate practice. Results of the survey questionnaire and of the two in-depth interviews are presented. Some conclusions and directions for further research (along with an analysis of the main limitations of the study) are then provided. 2. Green supply chain management: introduction and evolution

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Academic and corporate interest in sustainable and green supply chain management has risen considerably in recent years (Welford and Gouldson 1993, Vachon and Klassen 2006, Vachon 2007). This can be seen by looking at the consistent increase in papers published on this topic in international journals (Seuring and Mller 2008). Notwithstanding such a situation, clear and well-accepted denitions about this eld are still lacking. International peer-reviewed scientic journals were reviewed, looking for the keywords green/sustainable/low carbon supply chain management framework. The results of this analysis reveal that the green/sustainable/low carbon supply chain is still an evolving eld of study, in which there is a lack of unifying theories. It has to be said that several common themes within the green supply chain literature have started to emerge, even though most of the literature has addressed a single corporate function instead of focusing on an entire supply chain. Emerging contributions may be classied according to different typologies, whose denition has to be based on two dimensions:

the scope of the framework, namely the width of the operations and corporate functions that are included and considered; the degree of sustainability awareness, namely the extent to which the sustainability components are considered; sustainability components are dened coherently to objectives for sustainable development outlined for industry by UNCSD (1998) and include: economic (including promotion of economic growth, logistic efciency, achievement of good quality levels), environmental (including reduction in resource use and protection of natural environment), and social dimensions (including creation of productive employment, equality achievement).

Based on different combinations of the two dimensions, the following typologies may be introduced:

Papers dealing with green purchasing issues: Zsidisin and Siferd (2000) talk about Environmental and Green Purchasing dening it as the set of purchasing policies held, actions taken, and relationships formed in response to concerns associated with the natural environment. In their denition, they account, in great detail, for green and environmental issues, but completely discard social issues. A similar denition may be obtained in Carter and Carter (1998). Therefore, these frameworks are characterised by a narrow scope (being concerned only with a single corporate function) and by a low sustainability awareness (as it focuses only on green and environmental issues, discarding social issues). Similarly, Zsidisin and Siferd (2000) also introduce the Green Logistics concept. Papers dealing with green supply chain issues: Hervani et al. (2005)dene green supply chain management as the addition of the Green component to supply chain management, addressing the inuence and relationships of supply chain management to the natural environment. Motivated by an environmentally-conscious mindset, it can also stem from a competitiveness motive within organisation. In particular, they introduce the following equation: Green Supply Chain Management = Green Purchasing + Green Manufacturing + Materials Management + Green Distribution and Marketing + Reverse Logistics. For this reason, green supply chain management includes (as already mentioned by Zsidisin and Siferd 2000) as subsets all the mentioned sub-disciplines. Tsoulfas and Pappis (2008) introduce a comprehensive set of metrics for evaluating the environmental performance of a supply chain across all the dimensions identied by Hervani et al. (2005). Therefore, papers like these

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cover a wide scope (the whole supply chain) with a low degree of sustainability awareness, by just addressing green and environmental issues (discarding social issues). Papers dealing with corporate socially responsible (CSR) purchasing issues: Carter and Jennings (2002a, 2004) introduce the concept of Corporate Socially Responsible Purchasing. Basically, they evaluate the impact of purchasing and logistics decisions on several dimensions, like Diversity, Human Rights, Philanthropy, and Safety. Interestingly, also the Environmental dimension is cited, by taking into account several green variables. Therefore, these frameworks are characterised by a narrow scope (being just concerned with a single corporate function) and by an average sustainability awareness (as they are focused on social issues but taking into account also green and environmental ones). Similarly, the same authors (Carter and Jennings 2002a, 2004) also introduce the CSR Logistics concept. Papers dealing with CSR supply chain issues: By broadening the scope, Carter and Jennings (2002b) dene the corporate socially responsible supply chain, focusing on CSR issues across the whole supply chain, by measuring the performance across the above-mentioned dimensions not only at the focal rm but throughout the whole value-creation process. This framework is characterised by a wide scope (being concerned with the whole supply chain) and by an average sustainability awareness (as it focused on social issues but taking into account also green and environmental ones). Papers dealing with sustainable supply chain issues: Seuring and Mller s (2008) work introduces a more complete denition, that describes sustainable supply chain management as the management of material, information, and capital ows as well as cooperation among companies along the supply chain while taking goals from all three dimensions of sustainable development, i.e., economic, environmental, and social, into account which are derived from customer and stakeholder requirements. Therefore, in sustainable supply chains, environmental and social criteria need to be fullled by the members to remain within the supply chain, while it is expected that competitiveness would be maintained through meeting customer needs and related economic criteria. Therefore, this denition includes issues of green supply chain management and CSR supply chain management. Frameworks like this are characterised by wide scope (as they are concerned with operations as a supply chain level) and a high degree of sustainability awareness (as all three dimensions of sustainability are taken into account). Papers dealing with sustainable purchasing issues: Several papers develop sustainability-related frameworks and models for single functions in a supply chain, like sustainable logistics (Neto et al. 2008) and sustainable purchasing (Pagell, Wu, and Wasserman 2010). Such frameworks are characterised by a narrow scope (being just concerned with a single corporate function) and a high degree of sustainability awareness (as all three dimensions of sustainability are taken into account).

Introduced typologies may be graphically represented according to a two-axis diagram: on the horizontal axis, the scope is reported; on the vertical axis, the sustainability awareness is accounted for. For instance, Carter and Jenningss (2004) framework about CSR purchasing may be classied on the centre-left side, as it is focused on just one corporate function (purchasing) rather than the whole supply chain, and it takes into account social (and, slightly, environmental) responsibility. Sustainable supply chain frameworks, characterised by a wide scope and a high sustainability awareness, would be placed on the top-right side (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Green/CSR/sustainable supply chain frameworks classication.

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The emergence of these paradigms that have hybridised the supply chain management theories with environmental, social, and sustainability concepts is starting to inuence also the way in which partners and suppliers are selected within a supply chain. The emergence of the sustainability paradigm needs a rethinking of the traditional supplier selection criteria, as improving the environmental and sustainability performance of the whole supply system is one of the main goals of this eld of study. Indeed, as supplier selection represents a crucial process within SCM (de Boer, Labro, and Morlacchi 2001; de Boer and van der Wegen 2003, Bruno et al. 2012), the emergence of green/sustainable supply chain paradigms would be expected to have favoured the development of an emerging body of literature on green/sustainability aspects in supplier selection problems. Therefore, in order to verify this hypothesis, the remainder of the paper will be devoted to an assessment of the penetration of green issues both in the literature regarding the SSP and in corporate practice. 3. Supplier selection problem Suppliers are required to have an adequate set of competencies to be part of a competitive supply system (Esposito and Passaro 2009). To this aim, focal rms in supply chains perform various actions and strategies: in particular, the assessment processes has assumed a crucial importance. This represents a compulsory and critical starting-point for the achievement of a collaborative customersupplier system (de Boer, Labro, and Morlacchi 2001; Choy and Lee 2003, Prahinski and Benton 2004). Since the 1960s, the identication of relevant attributes and criteria to be considered in the SSP has constituted an attractive research area. Traditionally, supplier evaluation was fundamentally based on nancial measures; recently, more and more emphasis was devoted to other aspects, bringing multiple criteria into the evaluation process. Dickson (1966) listed 23 criteria for suppliers selection, based on a survey of purchasing manager. The analysis showed that quality, delivery, and performance history could be considered, in their respective order, the three most important criteria. Ha and Krishnan (2008) updated this set of attributes, taking into account 30 criteria. This attribute list (shown in Table 1) provides the rst avour of the complexity of the problem, as many conicting factors should be taken into account. Moreover, while some of these factors can be easily measured, qualitative and intangible concepts are also involved: the aggregation of these attributes in a nal judgement can result in a tricky problem. For these reasons, a wide spectrum of methodologies were developed and applied in recent years to deal with the SSP. Again, looking at the nature of the problem, it is expectable that multi-criteria decision-making methodologies will play a major role in the approaches proposed for solving the problem (which is intrinsically multi-dimensional). To the aim of analysing the current literature about the supplier selection problems, the keywords supplier selection, vendor selection, supplier/vendor evaluation, supplier/vendor assessment were searched for in abstracts, keywords, and bodies of the papers by using the online tools Scopus and Google Scholar. In Figure 2, the result of the search process in terms of number of papers published per year is shown. The considerable total number of papers reveals the signicant and growing attention devoted to the SSP in recent years. In order to understand whether this huge number of papers published in literature is parallelled by the emergence of green supply chain management and if, as a result of this, green issues were incorporated in the supplier selection problem, the literature was carefully scrutinised in order to identify the current state of the art on these issues. 4. Greener supplier selection problem: state of the art The greener supplier selection problem can be dened as a classical supplier selection problem in which, among the others, environmental criteria are also taken into account in order to select and monitor suppliers performances.
Table 1. Attributes list from Ha and Krishnan (2008). After sales service Amount of past business Attitude Catalogue technology Communication system Delivery Ease of use E-commerce capability Environmentally friendly products Financial position Geographical location Impression JIT capability Labour relations Maintainability Management and organisation Operational controls Packaging ability Performance history Price Product appearance Production facilities and capacity Quality Reciprocal arrangements Reputation and position in industry Response to customer request Technical capability Technical support Training aids Warranties and claims

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Figure 2. Supplier selection problem papers time series.

With the aim of analysing the current literature on greener supplier selection problems, the key-words, sustainable/ green/greener supplier/vendor selection, sustainable/green/greener supplier/vendor evaluation, sustainable/green/ greener supplier/vendor assessment, green/sustainable/environmental criteria for supplier selection, CSR criteria for supplier selection were searched for in abstracts, keywords and bodies of the papers retrieved in the literature review about the generic supplier selection problem illustrated in the previous section. Moreover, each paper was analysed in detail, in order to identify studies that take into account one or more green criteria in the denition of a supplier performance function. Looking at the data in Table 2, it can be seen that attention has focused on this topic at an early stage. However, it is possible to observe a growing trend revealing increasing interest towards green issues in supplier selection. In particular, the GSSP problem literature has experienced striking growth in the last years, with 16 out of the 28 total papers being published in the period 20072010. This can be interpreted as a result of the approval of more restrictive environmental regulations (for example, RoHS and RAEE in the European Union) aimed at making manufacturers, wholesalers, and nal distributors fully responsible for the environmental impact of their products (Lee et al. 2009). A further perspective is offered, looking at the countries of origin of the authors. Papers were classied looking at the country where the institution of the rst author is based (Table 3). Interestingly, apart from the USA and UK, Asian countries (Taiwan, China, India, and Turkey) are the most prolic contributors to the topic. This evidence can be explained and supported by several factors:

Asian countries constitute one of the most important hubs for raw materials and semi-nished supplies; this inuences academic research, encouraging the development of studies related to supplier selection problem. European and Northern American focal companies within supply chains are requesting tighter compliance to environmental standards for their Asian suppliers, in order to cope with increasing environmental awareness from their customers; thus, the greener supplier selection problem is a real and practical issue for many companies in these regions.

Looking at journals publishing contributions related to the topic, it appears that papers incorporating green issues in the supplier selection problem were published on journals belonging to different disciplinary areas (for further details, see Table 5).
Table 2. Greener supplier selection problem papers time series. Year Papers Year Papers 1997 1 2004 0 1998 1 2005 0 1999 0 2006 1 2000 0 2007 4 2001 1 2008 4 2002 1 2009 4 2003 1 2010 8

Total 28

International Journal of Production Research Table 3. Greener supplier selection problem papers classication by country. Country Papers Taiwan 7 USA 5 UK 4 India 3 China 3 Turkey 3 Canada 1 Italy 1 Sweden 1

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Table 4. Greener supplier selection problem papers classication by methodology. Single methodologies Qualitative methodologies Maths-based methodologies Enarsson (1998) Handeld et al. (2002), Sarkis (2003), Lu et al. (2007), Kannan et al. (2008), Hsu and Hu (2009), Zhu et al. (2010) Feyziolu and Bykzkan (2008) Bai and Sarkis (2010a, 2010b) Huang and Keskar (2007) Humphreys et al. (2006), Jain et al. (2007) Yu and Tsai (2008), Ozgen et al. (2008), Lee et al. (2009), Tuzkaya et al. (2009), Che (2010), Kuo et al. (2010), Mafakheri et al. (2010) Humphreys et al. (2003a, 2003b) Tsai and Hung (2009), Awasthi et al. (2010), Sasikumar and Noorul Haq (2010) Ishikawa diagram AHP/ANP Choquet integral Rough set theory Multi-attribute utility theory Fuzzy logic AHP/ANP + other

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Combined methodologies

Case-based reasoning + multiattribute utility theory Fuzzy logic + other

Table 5. Greener supplier selection problem papers classication by journal. Journals International Journal of Production Research Journal of Cleaner Production International Journal of Production Economics Expert Systems with Applications International Journal of Environmental Science and Technology Computers & Industrial Engineering European Journal of Operational Research European Journal of Purchasing & Supply Management Information Sciences International Journal of Management and Decision Making International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management International Journal of Operations and Production Management Journal of Materials Processing Technology Journal of Multiple-Valued Logic and Soft Computing Supply chain Management: An International Journal Total No. of papers 6 4 4 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 28

The top contributor is a well-established journal in the Operations Management area (International Journal of Production Research) that published a total of six papers on the topic, followed by another journal from the same area (International Journal of Production Economics) and a sustainability-focused journal (Journal of Cleaner Production), both with four contributions. Furthermore, these papers can be classied according to the employed methodology, following the classication framework introduced by Ha and Krishnan (2008).

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Of the 28 surveyed papers, three (Noci 1997, Min and Galle 2001, Chien and Shih 2007) were concerned just with the denition of theoretical approaches, dening a framework for dealing with the problem and identifying relevant criteria for selecting environmentally friendly suppliers. Most of the papers (25 out of 28) were devoted to the development of solution methodologies. A classication of these papers is reported in Table 4. Thirteen out of 28 papers developed models based on the use of an approach based on a single methodology. In particular, Enarsson (1998) introduced a qualitative methodology based on the Ishikawa diagram. The other 12 papers utilised mathematical methodologies to cope with the problem, in order to provide suppliers ranking taking into account environmental criteria: Handeld et al. (2002), Sarkis (2003); Lu, Wu, and Kuo (2007); Kannan et al. (2008), Hsu and Hu (2009), and Zhu, Dou, and Sarkis (2010) developed methodologies based on the analytic hierarchy process and its network variant analytic network process (AHP/ANP) (Saaty 1980, 1994, 2001); Feyziolu and Bykzkan (2008) employed the Choquet Integral approach, while Bai and Sarkis (2010a, 2010b) utilised the rough set theory, and Huang and Keskar (2007) developed a model based on multi-attribute utility theory. Fuzzy logic was employed by Humphreys et al. (2006) and Jain, Wadhwa, and Deshmukh (2007). The remaining papers were based on the combination of two of more methodologies; interestingly, seven more papers employed a hybrid methodology obtained by combining the AHP/ANP with other methods (Ozgen et al. 2008, Yu and Tsai 2008, Lee et al. 2009, Tuzkaya et al. 2009, Che 2010, Kuo et al. 2010, Mafakheri, Breton, and Ghoniem 2010). Humphreys et al. (2003a, 2003b) utilised a combination of case-based reasoning and multi-attribute value methodologies. Sasikumar and Noorul Haq (2010) implemented a methodology based on the combination of linear programming and fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making techniques, while Tsai and Hung (2009) combined fuzzy logic and goal programming. Awasthi et al. (2010) combined fuzzy logic and TOPSIS methodology. Figure 2 depicts a schema for synthesising and classifying all the above-mentioned papers according to their methodologies. Clearly, the AHP/ANP (employed in 13 out of 28 papers, in single or combined models) seems to be the most suitable methodology, owing to the intrinsic multicriteria nature of the GSSP. Indeed, a large number of criteria are involved in the papers considered. Table 6 reports an extract of a survey of the green criteria employed in the 28 papers considered. Criteria reporting more than 10 occurrences in the considered papers are cited in the table. It can be seen that almost all the papers focus on waste-management issues; a considerable number of papers focus on environmental staff training within the supplier organisation. Energy-efciency issues are also considered, such as the availability of clean technologies and of a hazardous-materials management system. Interestingly, the criteria survey provided by Ha and Krishnan (2008) reported in Table 1 did not report any of these criteria, just mentioning a generic criterion environmentally friendly products. Another interesting perspective is offered by the negligible penetration of social criteria in the papers surveyed. Indeed, no social criterion reports more than 10 occurrences in the surveyed papers. Despite the relatively low overall number of papers published on the topic in the whole period under consideration, it is still possible to identify an evolutionary trajectory of the developed approaches. Indeed, published papers can be classied according to two dimensions (Figure 3):

the degree of formalisation of the problem, intended to be very low for theoretical frameworks and very high for synthetic models; the scope of the involved criteria: narrow if only green/sustainable criteria are involved, wide if these criteria are included in a more generic framework aimed at incorporating green criteria in an operational model (including also more traditional criteria) for solving the supplier selection problem.

Table 6. Green criteria survey. Environmental criteria Availability of a waste management system Green design capability Environmental staff training and involvement Energy efciency and resource consumption Availability of an environmental management system (ISO 14001 Certication) Percentage of waste that goes to landll Percentage of recycled waste Availability of a green supplier selection system Use of green materials in the production process Availability of a hazardous-substance management system Air-emission level Availability and use of clean technologies No. 16 15 13 12 12 11 11 10 10 10 10 10

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Figure 3. Papers classication on the basis of the employed methodology.

Figure 4. Greener supplier selection papers evolutionary pattern.

Thus, Figure 4 depicts an evolutionary trajectory of the developed approaches for coping with the GSSP. Nocis (1997) seminal paper can be placed on the bottom-right side, as it provides a theoretical framework considering only green criteria. At the other extreme, Lee et al.s (2009) paper developed a very formalised model, based on a hybrid AHP architecture, in which green criteria are considered as a subset of the variables that have to be taken into account in order to select and monitor suppliers. Therefore, it can be stated that the current research trend for the greener supplier selection problem is to incorporate green criteria within traditional supplier selection approaches, thanks to the use of appropriate multi-criteria decisionmaking techniques. Furthermore, as already mentioned, the degree of sustainability awareness is mainly concentrated on environmental issues; social criteria are not yet being incorporated in evaluation models. Nevertheless, while the number of applications is growing, there is little empirical evidence of the practical usefulness of such tools. This aspect has already been highlighted, in the broader case of the generic supplier selection problem, in several studies (Weber et al. 1991, de Boer and van der Wegen 2003, Bruno et al. 2012). Also, in the case of the greener supplier selection problem, very often, the proposed models are tested on generic applications, numerical examples, and computational experiments, with less emphasis on the problems emerging in the practical implementation

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Table 7. Papers classication based on proposed application. Proposed application Numerical example Real-world case study Theoretical approach No. of papers 13 11 4

References Humphreys et al. (2003a), Sarkis (2003), Humphreys et al. (2006), Jain et al. (2007), Lu et al. (2007), Ozgen et al. (2008), Tuzkaya et al. (2009), Awasthi et al. (2010), Bai and Sarkis (2010a), Bai and Sarkis (2010b), Mafakheri et al. (2010), Zhu et al. (2010), Tsai and Hung (2009) Handeld et al. (2002), Humphreys et al. (2003b), Huang and Keskar (2007), Feyziolu and Bykzkan, G. (2008), Kannan et al. (2008), Yu and Tsai (2008), Hsu and Hu (2009), Lee et al. (2009), Che (2010), Kuo et al. (2010), Sasikumar and Noorul Haq (2010) Noci (1997), Enarsson (1998), Min and Galle (2001), Chien and Shih (2007)

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of the methodology, on its strengths and weaknesses, and on the appreciation given by the practitioners and managers involved in decision-making processes. In this respect, Table 7 proposes a classication of the surveyed papers in terms of the proposed application and validation methodology. It is worth noting that, in most cases (17 out of 28 surveyed papers), no real-world applications are provided. This is always cited, by the author themselves, as one of the greatest limitations of these studies (Bai and Sarkis 2010a, 2010b). Furthermore, even if a test of the developed methodology in a real corporate environment is performed, results are not always encouraging in terms of usability. Indeed, as pointed out by Huang and Keskar (2007), researchers overly emphasised the need for quantitative methods and overlooked the importance of integration with business strategic thinking when it comes to supplier selection. This also applies to the emerging eld of study of greener supplier selection. For this reason, it would be interesting to understand the current degree of penetration of emerging green issues in supplier selection corporate practice. Therefore, in the reminder of the paper, an empirical analysis is conducted in order to investigate the following issues:

Is the growing academic literature interest in green supply chain management and greener supplier selection linked to a growing awareness among real-world rms of these issues? To what extent are rms incorporating greener supplier selection criteria into their supplier selection practices? What are the barriers preventing rms from incorporating green supplier selection criteria into their supplier selection practices?

In particular, the results of a twofold process will be discussed. First of all, the analysis of a questionnaire survey targeting the top 100 manufacturing companies operating in South Yorkshire (UK) and investigating their supplier selection procedure (and the related use of green criteria) will be presented, and then in-depth interviews in two large multinational rms operating in complex industries addressing the same topic will be illustrated. 5. Greener supplier selection problem: an empirical analysis After having reviewed the literature on the greener supplier selection problem, an assessment of the penetration of green issues in the corporate processes for supplier selection was performed. Thus, the objective is to verify the state of the practice, in order to understand if green criteria are utilised by rms within formalised supplier selection methods for ranking and evaluating vendors. In order to perform this verication process, a twofold analysis perspective was employed:

horizontal analysis, through a questionnaire survey sent to a sample of rms within South Yorkshire; vertical analysis, through face-to-face interviews of purchasing managers in large rms operating in an international context within complex industries.

Details of the two phases are reported in the following subsections. 5.1. Horizontal analysis A survey questionnaire was performed by involving rms from South Yorkshire. This area was selected based on its industrial history. Indeed, economic activities in the county strongly relied on very energy-intensive and polluting indus-

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trial processes, such as carbon extraction and steel manufacture. For these reasons, South Yorkshire (within the whole Yorkshire and Humber region) is one of the most polluted UK areas. In recent decades, the county was interested by a transformation process that has seen the closure of mines and steel factories (in large part delocalised). Since, in the county, several initiatives aimed at the decarbonisation of the economy are being launched, the area seems to be an interesting scenario to test the adoption of green criteria within corporate supplier selection processes. In order to perform this assessment, a questionnaire survey was submitted to rms operating within South Yorkshire. In particular, the questionnaire was submitted to the top 100 manufacturing businesses (ranked by annual turnover) within the county, thanks to a league table developed by the Logistics and Supply Chain Management Research Centre at the University of Shefeld and published in the local newspaper The Star (samples of these rankings are available online at: http://www.ultimate-comms.co.uk/business/business/top100/page4.pdf and http://www.thestar.co.uk/news/business/manufacturers_are_back_in_the_black_1_3792705). Most of the companies within the list operate in the advanced materials/engineering and traditional metallurgical products sectors. After some demographic information, rms were asked to state whether they utilise formalised methodologies for selecting and ranking their suppliers; then, based on the key performance indicators provided by the green SCOR model, rms were asked to state the importance that each single dimension has within their supplier selection process. Green SCOR model is a comprehensive framework for evaluating supply chain performances, developed by the Supply Chain Council, an organisation of supply chain professionals and rms (for further details, see Bolstorff and Rosenbaum 2003; Poluha 2007); within this framework, several measures are provided for assessing suppliers. These measures are partitioned in ve categories, as reported in Table 8; in each category, traditional measures are mixed with green indicators that attempt to keep track of sustainability records of the supplierbuyer relationship. As regards the questionnaire, 36 complete responses were collected. Table 9 splits the sample of rms according to size, while Table 10 provides a description of the sectors to which each rm belongs.

Table 8. Green SCOR model categories. Categories Cost Delivery punctuality Flexibility Quality Innovation level Total No. of green indicators 4 4 3 8 4 23 No. of standard indicators 3 6 6 17 4 36 Total 7 10 9 25 8 59

Table 9. Respondent rms classication based on number of employees. Size More than 250 employees 100249 employees Less than 100 employees Total Total 16 12 8 36

Table 10. Respondent rms classication based on sector. Sector Advanced Materials/Engineering Traditional Metallurgical Products Manufacturing Automotive Supplies Plastics Manufacturing Glass Manufacturing Textile Products Manufacturing No. of rms 16 12 5 1 1 1

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Although all rms (36 out of 36) stated they are taking interventions to reduce their carbon footprint, interestingly, 13 out of 36 companies stated they are not utilising any formalised methodology for selecting and ranking suppliers. Therefore, they are not keeping track, in a formalised way, of performances of their suppliers across environmental dimensions. This result is relevant, as it shows the rst gap between literature and practice. Thus, just 23 out of 36 companies were able to respond to the specic question about the use of indicators from the green SCOR model. In particular, companies were asked to rate each indicator according to a 9-point Likert scale, where 1 denotes not at all important, 5 denotes important, and 9 denotes extremely important. Tables 11 and 12 report the results of this assessment process. In particular, frequency values represent the number of rms in the sample that rated each indicator to be at least important in their supplier selection process. By comparing Tables 11 and 12, one can understand the variation in rms consideration of the single indicators. With reference to green indicators, it can be seen that the only measure that is rated to be at least important (out of 23 different indicators) by at least half of the respondents is the Waste generated from products and materials criterion. This is probably due to the amount of regulations and norms about waste treatment. Interestingly, there is a perfect coherence between literature and practice on this point. Indeed, the above-mentioned literature review also showed a similar result, as the criterion Availability of a Waste Management System was also the most cited in academic papers.

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Table 11. Judgement and frequency rates for green SCOR model traditional indicators.

International Journal of Production Research Table 12. Judgement and frequency rates about Green SCOR model green indicators.

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Good scores are reported by the indicators Environmental Cost Savings, Energy Efciency of Systems, and Environmental Relationship and Cooperation Level, referred to be at least important by 10 out of 23 rms. In particular, as regards the Energy Efciency of Systems indicator, it was also among the most cited indicators in the literature review of academic papers. It is interesting to notce that all these aspects are mostly concerned with process issues, rather than green product design capabilities. On the other hand, 17 out of 36 traditional indicators are judged at least important by at least half of the respondents. This result involves measures from each category (cost, delivery punctuality, exibility, innovation, quality). This helps us to understand that most of the rms have a very traditional approach to supplier selection, usually not incorporating green issues in their formalised models and methods. 5.2. Vertical analysis The analysis on implementation of green criteria in supplier selection processes was then extended by conducting faceto-face interviews of purchasing managers in large enterprises operating in an international context within complex industries. In particular, two companies were visited:

a British company operating in the aerospace industry, mainly manufacturing complex components for aircrafts, with global operations (hereafter, Firm A); an Italian state-owned company operating in the railway industry with a signicant presence in the UK, mainly manufacturing components for railway systems such as trains for intercity, regional/commuter, and transit/metro applications with vertically integrated capabilities in car bodies, trucks/bogies (wheel sets), and propulsion systems, whose eets operate in 18 countries (hereafter, Firm B).

The in-depth interviews involved a discussion about the supplier selection procedures implemented by each company. This stage of the research was aimed at conrming the results arising from the questionnaire survey about the lack of adoption of environmental criteria in the supplier selection process.

2880 Table 13. Selected indicators: Firm A. Category Cost Time

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Indicator Supplier cost-saving initiatives Cost variance from expected costs Supplier lead time against industry norm Suppliers long-range planning capability Purchase order cycle time Percentage of late deliveries Supplier ability to respond to quality problems Materials technology variety Product and service variety Product volume variability capabilities Product development time Response to environmental product requests Technological capability levels Involvement in new product design Introduction of new processes Buyersupplier partnership level Deliveries rejection rate Delivery reliability Management quality Waste generated from products and materials

Flexibility

Innovation

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Quality

Table 14. Indicators ranking according to AHP pairwise comparison: Firm A. Indicator Delivery reliability Deliveries rejection rate Cost variance from expected costs Introduction of new processes Management quality Supplier ability to respond to quality problems Percentage of late deliveries Buyersupplier partnership level Technological capability levels Involvement in new product design Product volume variability capabilities Waste generated from products and materials Supplier cost-saving initiatives Product and service variety Materials technology variety Suppliers long-range planning capability Supplier lead time against industry norm Response to environmental product requests Product development time Purchase order cycle time Weight 0.1927 0.1892 0.1289 0.0986 0.0634 0.0597 0.0546 0.0381 0.0366 0.0271 0.0216 0.0177 0.0175 0.0167 0.0088 0.0082 0.0073 0.0052 0.0045 0.0036

The research methodology adopted was based on the interaction between the research group and company managers. For this reason, a working committee including members from different departments of the two rms (Material Planning, Quality Management, Purchasing) was created to discuss critical attributes for supplier selection. The meetings took place at the two company sites and were moderated by members of the research group. In particular, managers were invited to select, among indicators listed in the Green SCOR Model, those variables that are currently being utilised in the supplier selection practice. Even this more detailed discussion revealed that green criteria are not yet playing a crucial role within supplier selection procedures in the corporate practice. Indeed, as regards Firm A, 20 measures were indicated as relevant, but only two of these belong to the green class. Again, the criterion Waste generated from products and materials is on the list, and the criterion Response to environmental product request is included (Table 13).

International Journal of Production Research Table 15. Selected indicators: Firm B. Category Cost Time Flexibility Innovation Quality Indicator

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Cost variance from expected costs Supplier lead time against industry norm Purchase order cycle time Percentage of late deliveries Supplier ability to respond to quality problems Product and service variety Product volume variability capabilities Technological capability levels Involvement in new product design Introduction of new processes Buyersupplier partnership level Level of supplier s defect-free deliveries Supplier rejection rate Delivery reliability Percentage of wrong supplier delivery Mutual trust Satisfaction with supplier relationship Supplier assistance in solving technical problems Extent of mutual assistance leading in problem-solving efforts Buyersupplier partnership level

In order to understand the relative importance of these two indicators compared with the whole set of indicators, Firm A managers were asked to evaluate the hierarchical schema composed by categories and selected indicators according to the AHP pairwise comparisons technique (for more details, see Saaty 1980, 2001). This allowed indicators to be ranked according to a weight representing its perceived importance in the formulation of an overall judgement about supplier performance. It can be easily seen (Table 14) that the two selected green indicators account for a neglegible percentage of total assigned weights. The criterion Waste generated from products and materials accounts for 1.77% of the global performance (it is interesting to note how, again, this criterion is the green indicator with which the most of the weight is associated), and the criterion Response to environmental product request accounts for 0.52% of the global performance. Therefore, even if these measures are selected and utilised for ranking suppliers, their inuence on the nal suppliers score is not at all relevant, while the performance evaluation is mainly driven by traditional measures, such as Delivery Reliability, Deliveries Rejection rate and Cost variance from expected costs (these three measures, together, exceed 50% of the total performance evaluation weight). As regards Firm B, again 20 indicators were selected (Table 15), but none of the green variables play a role in the supplier selection process (it is worth noting that in Case B, no green criteria were selected at all. Therefore, weights of different criteria are not reported. This was done, in Case A, just to show that green criteria had a negligible weight overall) Furthermore, managers from both the interviewed rms highlighted the need for improving their own supplier selection system by including and incorporating these dimensions (also due to increasing demands from regulatory frameworks). 6. Discussion and managerial implications Both case studies and survey results seem to conrm that, despite the growing interest emerging from the analysis of the academic literature, the focus on green issues in supplier selection in the corporate practice is at an early stage. Indeed, results emerging from the questionnaire survey reveal that, in the sample considered, rms that adopt formalised supplier selection methods still pay little attention to environmental criteria, being more focused on traditional criteria. This evidence was reinforced by the in-depth interviews that showed how even large MNE companies are still lacking a formalised assessment of suppliers environmental performance. In this context, both the questionnaire and the in-depth interviews reveal that, among environmental criteria, those related to waste management are the most popular, probably due to the presence of more stringent legislative constraints on these issues. This evidence is coherent with the ndings of the literature review (in which waste management was the most cited criterion). The results emerging from this study can also be interpreted thanks to Hills (1993) theory on order winning and order qualifying criteria. Order qualiers are those criteria that a company must meet for a customer even to consider

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it as a possible supplier ; order winners are those criteria that win the order for the company, i.e. they are the reasons that the customer selects the product (service) of one company over another . Indeed (as also highlighted by management of both the interviewed rms) currently, it appears that, in the best-case scenario, environmental and sustainability criteria play a role in the pre-qualication stage of the supplier selection problem. In fact, due to environmental regulations, suppliers have to meet some minimum requirements in order to be eligible to work with the focal rm in the supply chain. However, after that, most of the companies do not keep track of environmental performance systematically and do not use environmental variables to discriminate further among qualied suppliers. Moreover, the managers interviewed in the two case studies indicated several barriers and obstacles to the implementation of green and environmental criteria in their own supplier-evaluation systems, such as:

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Difculty in measuring environmental variables with numerical indicators, as many of the indicators are referring to qualitative and intangible dimensions. This aspect has already been highlighted by Tsoulfas and Pappis (2008), who suggest that these circumstances often require the implementation of more complex methodologies than simple balanced scorecards that are employed in most of the corporate contexts for supplier selection. This sort of gap between the wide variety of approaches proposed by the academic literature and their lack of penetration in the real corporate world conrms the results highlighted by several previous studies (Weber et al. 1991, de Boer and van der Wegen 2003). Moreover, while process-related measures are simpler to be monitored (as highlighted in the empirical analysis, waste creation) product-related measures are more difcult to be assessed, as they also depend on nal customer behavioural issues, and the use of product throughout its entire lifecycle (as also highlighted by Staikos and Rahimifard 2007). Conict between environmental variables and traditional supplier selection measures, as a better environmental performance could cause cost increases. This implies that including environmental variables in a formalised supplier selection model requires a complete revision of the model itself and of the weights that are assigned to each specic variable. Lack of transparency by suppliers on environmental issues, as vendors do not always disclose their environmental management systems, especially if they are based in countries in which environmental regulations are not yet very stringent and if they outsource a relevant quota of their value-chain activities. This is related to the increasing structural complexity of supply chains and to the increasing diversity and global nature of business systems, as highlighted by Stonebraker, Goldhar, and Nassos (2009). Difculty in obtaining validated/audited data on environmental performances. Indeed, even if suppliers are willing to share gures about their performances, it is quite difcult to make judgements about the reliability of these data. While traditional measures (such as Lead Time, Cost Variance, Percentages of Wrong Deliveries) can be easily measured by the customer once the transaction has been completed, most of the green measures data (such as Waste generated from products and materials and Energy efciency of systems) can only be provided by the supplier itself.

Therefore, including green performance measures within a supplier selection formalised system requires the involvement of the whole supply system in this process. Indeed, measuring suppliers environmental performance requires the establishment of collaborative relationships across the supply chain, including such aspects as joint environmental goal setting, shared environmental planning, and working together to reduce pollution or other environmental impacts (Vachon and Klassen 2008). Emphasis on the collaborative relationship is also needed in order to promote data sharing and validation across the whole supply chain, for effectively monitoring and assessing the identied measures. This is consistent with recent developments in the eld of supply chain management showing that more sustainable operations cannot be achieved by adopting a single-rm approach (Vachon and Klassen 2008). These results are similar to the ones drawn from other studies on the general supplier selection problem, highlighting that, while the number of literature applications is growing, there is little empirical evidence of the practical usefulness of such tools, highlighting a persistent dichotomy between theory and practice (de Boer and van der Wegen 2003).

7. Conclusions In recent years, increasing environmental awareness has encouraged the emergence of the new green and sustainable supply chain paradigms. The green/sustainable supply chain is still an emerging eld of study; notwithstanding such a situation, some common themes within this body of literature have started to emerge. Thus, also in the specic supplier selection-problem literature, green and sustainability criteria have started to be incorporated.

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This paper has provided a careful scrutiny of the works dealing with the greener supplier selection problem published in international scientic journals in recent years and is one of the rst reviews on this specic issue. The literature survey has highlighted that the penetration of green issues within the supplier selection-problem literature is still quite limited, as conrmed by the relatively low number of papers published that incorporate green criteria, compared with the huge body of literature regarding this topic. However, the literature analysis seems to reveal that there is a growing amount of attention towards the topic. The analysis has highlighted a clear evolution in the literature; indeed, after a theoretical development stage, green issues are increasingly being incorporated in traditional supplier selection multi-criteria formalised models, even though the practical usability of these models is often questioned. Indeed, most of the proposed approaches to solve the problem are not tested in a real-life scenario; even if this does happen, the focus on the practical usability and integration of these tools in the corporate life is quite limited (Huang and Keskar 2007). Therefore, in order to strengthen these ndings, this state-of-the-art literature review was then coupled to an analysis of the state of the practice. Firms within a UK county were contacted through a questionnaire survey to assess their use of supplier selection formalised methods and the degree of incorporation of green criteria within them; moreover, managers from two large multi-national enterprises (both operating in the UK) were interviewed to the same aim. Results arising from both these empirical investigations are consistent, conrming that in corporate practice, interest in green issues is still quite limited. Indeed, rms (both SMEs and larger organisations) tend to manage their supplier selection processes still in a very traditional way, by utilising standard measures (mainly related to cost, quality, and delivery punctuality). Therefore, while the number of literature applications dealing with the greener supplier selection problem is growing, there is little empirical evidence of the transfer of these applications into the real world. The causes of this dichotomy have also been investigated through managers interviews; these have highlighted signicant obstacles and barriers in the implementation of theoretical models for the greener supplier selection problem in the corporate practice. The results obtained in this paper should be further validated by trying to overcome the main limitations of this study. Indeed, in the questionnaire survey, rms from a specic region and from specic sectors (mainly concerned with manufacturing and complex industries) were considered. Therefore, further studies will be addressed at enlarging the sample of the empirical investigation by considering other geographical contexts and industries. Comparative analysis with different regions and countries could also reveal interesting ndings, highlighting the role of contextual factors (economical conditions, legislations, business climate) in shaping the attitude of businesses towards green practices in their supplier selection procedures. Moreover, latest trends and directions within the body of literature connected to this research should also be continuously monitored and reviewed, assessing the knowledge transfer rate of these studies towards real-life applications and their capability of overcoming the cited barriers for the implementation of theoretical models for the greener supplier selection problem in the corporate practice. Also, the degree of penetration of social criteria in supplier selection practice could be investigated.

Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the nancial support provided to this research by the Centre for Low Carbon Futures (CLCF), York, UK through the networks of Shefeld, Hull, York, and Leeds Universities. We also thank the anonymous referees and the editor-in-chief for the valuable comments that helped us in improving the quality of our paper.

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