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Sustainable buyer-supplier relationship (SBSR) capability is a dynamic or relational capability that is considered as the key condition for achieving sustainable competitive advantage through both the buyer and its suppliers investing their heterogeneous resources. To accurately measure and develop the buyer-supplier relationship capability from the sustainability perspective, this study first proposes an effective evaluation framework based on the relational view and triple-bottom-line approach. This framework is characterized by the fact that the SBSR is a relational capability from economic, environmental and social perspectives. Then, this study develops a novel visualization method based on DEMATEL and an advanced radar chart to evaluate the level of current SBSR capability and to identify development strategies for future SBSR capability. An empirical case evaluation of the framework from both buyer and supplier perspectives is completed with the aid of the visualization method in the textile industry of Pakistan. The results can help managers of both buyers and suppliers to easily identify the advantages and disadvantages of, and the development strategies for, each SBSR.

Green supplier development (GSD) is an important operational strategy that significantly contributes to environmental performance of the supply chain. However, green supplier evaluation for development, the first step in green supplier development, has not been widely reported in the literature. This article aims to develop a green supplier evaluation methodology for supplier development. Poor suppliers set and weak areas of each supplier are identified so that green supplier development practices can be implemented. This study proposes an environmental evaluation methodology based on environmental performance and environmental practices and use of development priority number to effectively assess suppliers’ green capability. A novel interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy numbers based reference-neighborhood rough set approach is then used to identify the poor supplier set and suppliers’ weak areas. The feasibility of this methodology is illustrated through a case study in a large chemical company. The methodology proposed can guide organizations when developing more specific GSD plans through identifying the poor suppliers and the weak areas.

One of the most critical operational practices influencing the environmental sustainability of organizations and their supply chains is the transport of materials, products and people. The carbon footprints, materials depletion, and general pollution emissions from transport vehicles makes their environmental burdens significant. Thus, identifying, selecting and implementing more environmentally conscious transportation vehicles can be of paramount importance for the development and management of greener supply chains. Given the relative importance of this issue, it is surprising that research on transport fleet evaluation, especially from an environmental sustainability perspective, has been rather limited. A primary challenge in this context is the broad range of influencing factors that need to be considered, many of which are not fully and easily measurable. This paper aims to (1) develop a holistic framework for sustainable transport fleet appraisal incorporating various vehicle performance, economic and environmental criteria, (2) introduce a novel hybrid approach for sustainable transportation vehicle evaluation and selection by combining a three-parameter interval grey number with a rough set theory and VIKOR method, (3) investigate the application of the proposed approach in a case example where empirical data is collected from industry experts, (4) evaluate the robustness of the methodology through sensitivity analysis experiments, and (5) provide practical insights and directions for future research in this area.

Supplier development is a critical competitive endeavor for organizations and their supply chains. Investigation into this area has increased over the past few years, yet further understanding of suppler development is needed. Specifically, recent supplier development investment practices have shown a shift from standalone actions by organization or supplier to joint actions between organization and suppliers. Faced with this phenomenon, the goal of this paper is to develop a theoretic model based on the Cobb–Douglas production function. The study focuses on determining optimal supplier development investment strategies with respect to joint actions that increase supplier production capability for the benefit of both the focal organization and its suppliers. The supplier development investment strategies mainly refer to joint actions between an organization and multiple suppliers through capital resources (tangible) investments, knowledge (intangible) investments, and sharing cost of capital resources (tangible) investments. Using various game theoretic models, we reveal how supplier development investment strategies and profits of all the members are affected by various buyer-supplier relationships and investment returns to scale reasons. Whether the focal organization (buyer) has any incentives to share cost of capital resources (tangible) investments is also investigated. Our first finding is that supplier development investment activities motivation is derived from increases in supply volume for the “increasing returns to scale” situation, and derives from increasing the organization and suppliers’ marginal profit in the “decreasing returns to scale” situation. Secondly, the cooperative relationship is more economically beneficial to the supply chain, but it also requires more capital resources and knowledge expenditures (investments) than a non-cooperative relationship. Thirdly, through numerical analysis it is found that the cooperative relationship can not obtain Pareto efficiency for all the members of the supply chain when using the Nash bargaining model. Additional gaming insights and implications are also provided from parametric analysis. Opportunities for further research are also presented.