A grey approach to evaluate success and risk factors in supply chain management

Abstract

Supply chain management, consisting of suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers, is one of the most important activities in today’s economy. Supply chain management provides a competitive advantage to businesses, helps them to be successful and enables better and quality products/services to be offered to customers at a lower cost, faster and more smoothly. For this purpose, it is important to identify critical success factors of supply chain management that make a company more competitive. However, supply chain processes are becoming more complex, and environmental, operational, man-made or strategically negative factors increase the risks in supply chain management. In this study, by benefiting from literature reviews, success and risk factors of supply chain management are examined and ranked by using expert evaluations. In order to obtain more effective results, a Grey theory based Grey-AHP evaluation method is used to determine the weights of the factors. With this technique, the biases arising from the subjective nature of judgments can be minimized and personal evaluations can be successfully and accurately represented. In this respect, the most important success and risk factors related to supply chain management were determined, and the results were evaluated by determining how the current situation could be improved.