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Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a very important role in national production, and provide more than 60% of the employment opportunities for the society. The benign development of small and medium-sized enterprises determines the sustainability of economic operation. In recent years, small and medium-sized enterprises have faced increasing operational pressure. Due to scale limitations, insufficient funds and weak bargaining power, small and medium-sized enterprises are often at a disadvantage when dealing with suppliers. One the one hand, large suppliers rely on the imbalance of bargaining power to increase the transaction costs of small and medium-sized enterprises; On the other hand, small and medium-sized suppliers with poor reputation may use legal loopholes to commit fraud, which may even threaten the survival of small and medium-sized enterprises in severe cases. However, the existing literature focuses more on the situation of large organizations facing complex and diverse suppliers. Therefore, this paper constructed a supplier selection evaluation framework for small and medium-sized enterprises, and proposed an extended PROMETHEE Ⅱ method to achieve sustainable supplier selection process. First, establish a sustainable supplier selection evaluation framework from the three dimensions of product and service capability, cooperation degree and risk factors; Second, combine the PROMETHEE Ⅱ approach with subjective preference parameters and probability language term set (PLTS) to obtain an extended PROMETHEE Ⅱ approach; Last, use the methodology of this paper to implement sustainable supplier selection for a small and medium-sized enterprise (M company) in China. The practical case and sensitivity analysis showed that the evaluation framework and method proposed in this paper were applicable and effective. Actual cases and sensitivity analysis showed that cost, credit and corporate irregularities were the three most important aspects for small and medium-sized enterprises to evaluate supplier performance.

Petrochemical industry is a high-pollution and high-risk industry. Under the trend of maintenance business outsourcing in petrochemical industry, the performance of maintenance suppliers is directly related to operation safety. Faced with large scale and varied capability of maintenance suppliers working in a dangerous environment with high temperature, high pressure and high explosivity, petrochemical companies need to evaluate the sustainability performance of maintenance suppliers with appropriate evaluation criteria and methods. However, few scholars focused on this problem of particular industries. Therefore, in this paper, a novel performance evaluation criteria framework of maintenance suppliers was formulated and an extended fuzzy PROMETHEE II method was proposed to assess their actual performance. Firstly, considering the lack of performance criteria in maintenance process of petrochemical firms, a sustainable supplier performance evaluation criteria framework was established from 3 dimensions, including basic aspect, processing aspect as well as sustainability aspect; Secondly, the fuzzy PROMETHEE II approach was presented by combining the fuzzy set theory with PROMETHEE II method; Finally, based on the case study of a Chinese petrochemical enterprise and sensitivity analysis of the decision framework, the effectiveness of the performance evaluation criteria and the applicability of the employed method were verified.

Chemical industry plays a pivotal role in the economy in every country. As chemical hazardous materials are usually characterized as inflammable, explosive, toxic, corrosive, and carcinogenic, if accidents happen in chemical company it can lead to irreversible environmental and health damage to the public. The chemical industry attaches great importance to safe production, technical professionalism, and service standardization. Nowadays, under the trend of equipment maintenance service outsourcing in chemical companies, the selection of maintenance suppliers with safe and sustainable records come first and foremost in the supplier selection process. However, these concerns from the chemical industry are currently inadequately addressed by most general supplier selection models. Therefore, this paper proposes an applicable methodology for selecting and evaluating equipment maintenance suppliers in the chemical industry, compatible with a safe and sustainable production context. To achieve the goal of &ldquo, safe operation and sustainable development in the future&rdquo, we established an evaluation criteria framework for equipment maintenance suppliers by combining the general supplier selection criteria and safe production characteristics together. Eight main criteria and 24 sub-criteria based on market acceptance, resource conditions, and safe production were included. Then a fuzzy TOPSIS model was presented to select the best equipment maintenance service supplier. Finally, by analyzing a case in W petrochemical company, the empirical results indicate that the proposed framework is of great practical value to select and evaluate equipment maintenance suppliers for safety and sustainable development in the chemical industry.