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The purpose of this study is to adopt a supply chain performance measurement (SCPM) framework as proposed by (Dweiri and Khan 2012) to model a novel SCPM index (SCPMI) system to measure and improve supply chain performance (SCP).

The adopted SCPM framework developed by Dweiri and Khan (2012) is used to model a generic SCPMI framework aided by analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method and inputs from industrial experts. To exemplify the applicability and efficiency of the generic SCPMI system, an automobile assembling company from an emerging economy was used. This SCMPI system is used to measure, improve and measure post-improvement SCP guided by DMAIC (define, measure, analyze, improve and control) methodology.

The study’s initial measurement results showed an average SCP of the case company over a four-month period as 82 per cent. DMAIC methodology was used to identify inherent problems and proposed improvements. The post-improvement SCP measurement saw an improvement from an average of 82 to 83.82 per cent over the four-month period.

The proposed generic SCPMI framework aided by AHP-DMAIC has been successfully implemented in a case company. After implementation, managers and decision-makers saw an improvement in their SCP. The proposed SCPMI system and results can be useful for benchmarking by manufacturing organizations for continuous SCP improvement.

An original SCPMI framework proposed is general in nature and can be applied in any organization.

This research aims to propose a framework for measuring customer loyalty for third party logistics (3PL) industry by exploring the attributes that are more attractive to customers and ascertain the mechanisms for increasing customer loyalty in 3PL industry.

Data were collected from one hundred and thirty-three (133) respondents who were employees of different industries that outsource 3PL services. The partial least square structural equation modeling (PLS–SEM) was deployed for analysis.

The results showed that service quality has a significant positive impact on customer orientation, customer satisfaction and relationship quality. On the other hand, customer orientation has been observed to positively impact customer satisfaction but an insignificant impact on customer loyalty and relationship quality. Customer satisfaction has a significant positive impact on relationship quality but an insignificant impact on customer loyalty. Also, relationship quality has a significant positive impact on customer loyalty.

The results recommend that 3PL companies' managers focus more on developing quality relationships with their customers, delivering exemplary service quality and offering customer orientation.

This study will help the stakeholders gain much more understanding and insights on how competitive advantage can be achieved and, consequently, help 3PL become the market leaders.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new typological environmentally sustainable human resources management evaluation framework to aid green candidate selection process for environmental management in developing economy local government agencies.

Presenting the narrative of developing economies local government context, this paper conducts an extensive review of relevant literature on green human resources management (GHRM) and green recruitment and selection.

Drawing on Siyambalapitiya et al. (2018) and the resource-based theory (RBT), the paper proposes and discusses an evaluation framework for guiding organizations’ green candidate selection process. The framework comprises of seven stages which begins with “training recruiters on green candidate assessment” to “making selection decision and inducting selected candidate” on organization’s environmental management policies and practices, and its green values.

Application of the proposed framework has implications for enhancing organizations’ efficiency, reducing cost, eliminating environment waste, as well as fostering green culture among employees. This paper also extends the strand of RBT by explaining how organizations could assess and select job applicants with significant intangible capability such as environmental management skills, knowledge and values to foster its competitive urge and sustainability.

This paper makes two main contribution to the GHRM literature. First, the paper proposes a new typological environmentally sustainable human resources management evaluation framework. Secondly, the paper focuses the framework on developing economies and local government organizations context, something that is currently non-existent.

Circular economy (CE) has gained considerable attention from researchers and practitioners over the past few years because of its potential social and environmental benefits. However, limited attention has been given in the literature to explore the drivers and barriers in CE implementation in emerging and developing countries besides China. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify the drivers and barriers to implementing a CE in Pakistan’s automobile manufacturing industry.

This study adopts an explorative approach to understand the drivers and barriers at the micro-level CE implementation in Pakistan’s automobile industry. The research design includes both qualitative and quantitative methods using a survey instrument and interviews to gather data. The use of the two main sources of data provides the opportunity for triangulation of the data to improve the validity of the findings, and enables greater inferences from the results.

This study shows that “profitability/market share/benefit” (30 percent), “cost reduction” (22 percent) and “business principle/concern for environment/appreciation” (19 percent) are the top three drivers. Similarly, “unawareness” (22 percent), “cost and financial constraint” (20 percent) and “lack of expertise” (17 percent) are the top three barriers in implementing CE principles in Pakistan automobiles industry.

This study considers only Pakistan automobiles industry, and the practical implications potentially limit to emerging Asian economies.

This study is the first of its kind that has investigated the drivers and barriers of CE at the organizational level in the automobile industry of Pakistan. Thus, it helps to advance the understanding of the subject matter and enables the formulation of effective policies and business strategies by practitioners for upscaling CE and sustainability.

The oil and gas industry is a crucial economic sector for both developed and developing economies. Delays in extraction and refining of these resources would adversely affect industrial players, including that of the host countries. Supplier selection is one of the most important decisions taken by managers of this industry that affect their supply chain operations. However, determining suitable suppliers to work with has become a phenomenon faced by these managers and their organizations. Furthermore, identifying relevant, critical and important criteria needed to guide these managers and their organizations for supplier selection decisions has become even more complicated due to various criteria that need to be taken into consideration. With limited works in the current literature of supplier selection in the oil and gas industry having major methodological drawbacks, the purpose of this paper is to develop an integrated approach for supplier selection in the oil and gas industry.

To address this problem, this paper proposes a new uncertain decision framework. A grey-Delphi approach is first applied to aid in the evaluation and refinement of these various available criteria to obtain the most important and relevant criteria for the oil and gas industry. The grey systems theoretic concept is adopted to address the subjectivity and uncertainty in human judgments. The grey-Shannon entropy approach is used to determine the criteria weights, and finally, the grey-EDAS (evaluation based on distance from average solution) method is utilized for determining the ranking of the suppliers.

To exemplify the applicability and robustness of the proposed approach, this study uses the oil and gas industry of Iran as a case in point. From the literature review, 21 criteria were established and using the grey-Delphi approach, 16 were finally considered. The four top-ranked criteria, using grey-Shannon entropy, include warranty level and experience time, relationship closeness, supplier’s technical level and risks which are considered as the most critical and influential criteria for supplier evaluation in the Iranian oil and gas industry. The ranking of the suppliers is obtained, and the best and worst suppliers are also identified. Sensitivity analysis indicates that the results using the proposed methodology are robust.

The proposed approach would assist supply chain practicing managers, including purchasing managers, procurement managers and supply chain managers in the oil and gas and other industries, to effectively select suitable suppliers for cooperation. It can also be used for other multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) applications. Future works on applying other MCDM methods and comparing them with the results of this study can be addressed. Finally, broader and more empirical works are required in the oil and gas industry.

This study is among the first few studies of supplier selection in the oil and gas industry from an emerging economy perspective and sets the stage for future research. The proposed integrated grey-based MCDM approach provides robust results in supplier evaluation and can be used for future domain applications.

Sustainability trends have changed the modus operandi in businesses even as the market environment becomes more socially conscious. However, relatively little research has been conducted on integrating social sustainability aspects with a focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR) into the selection of suppliers in the service sector, particularly the banking industry. In this paper, this study aims to propose a CSR decision support methodology to evaluate and prioritize socially responsible suppliers.

A novel integrated decision support methodology composed of Shannon Entropy and TOmada de Decisão Interativa e Multicritério (TODIM) methods is introduced. The Shannon-Entropy approach is used to estimate CSR factor weights, and TODIM is used to rank the suppliers, with the process completed in a group decision setting.

A Nigerian bank was used as a case study to test and show the usefulness of the CSR-based decision framework in evaluating and selecting socially responsible suppliers. The results show the topmost ranked suppliers that are recommended for future negotiations by the case (bank). The study will enable banks to select socially responsible suppliers, which could accelerate the attainment of sustainability objectives, protect their reputations and improve competitiveness.

This study pioneers the application of a novel decision methodology based on Shannon Entropy and TODIM in selecting socially sustainable suppliers in the Banking sector of an African emerging economy-Nigeria.

Technology and knowledge have become the buzzwords of the new millennium. Technological changes and demanding customers are creating a more knowledge intensive, turbulent, complex and uncertain environment. Organizations, which are able to continually build faster and cheaper new strategic assets than their competitors, create long-term competitive advantages. Thus, the growth of companies is directly associated with innovativeness and technological development, especially for small organizations that are more vulnerable to dynamic changes in market place. Organizations need a strategic framework that can help them to achieve the goal of technology development and competitiveness. The purpose of this paper is to develop such strategic framework for small organizations for their technology development and, hence, survival in marketplace.

Options field methodology, options profile methodology, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and fuzzy set theory are utilized to generate various options and profiles to propose a conceptual framework for technology development.

The results from the study showed that “mixed approach,” “strategic simulation approach” and the “regulatory environment approach,” in this order, emerged as the top three important options for the strategic technological development of small manufacturing enterprises.

This result can provide an original and more accurate implementation pathway toward technological innovative development in emerging economies. The proposed framework can provide valuable guidelines and recommendations to practicing managers and analysts for policy development to promote innovative and technological developments.

The purpose of paper is to develop a performance evaluation framework for manufacturing industry to evaluate overall manufacturing performance.

The best-worst method (BWM) is used to aid in developing a performance evaluation framework for manufacturing industry to evaluate their overall performance.

The proposed BWM-based manufacturing performance evaluation framework is implemented in an Indian steel manufacturing company to evaluate their overall manufacturing performance. Operational performance of the organization is very consistent and range between 60% and 70% throughout the year. Management performance can be seen high in the 1st and 2nd quarter of the financial year ranging from 70% to 80%, whereas a slight decrease in the management performance is observed in the 3rd and 4th quarter ranging from 60% to 70%. The social stakeholder performance has a peak in first quarter ranging from 80% to 100% as at start of financial year.

This paper utilized BWM, a MCDM method in developing a performance evaluation index that integrates several categories of manufacturing and evaluates overall manufacturing performance. This is a novel contribution to BWM decision-making application.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of stakeholder pressures on firm’s circular economy (CE) initiatives. The organizational responses are quite heterogeneous even when the firms face similar pressure. The authors have tried to explain this heterogeneity by using innovative capability as mediating variables.

Empirical survey data from Indian manufacturing firms are obtained to test the proposed hypotheses. The hypotheses are grounded in resource-based view of the firm. The authors used structural equation modeling approach with maximum likelihood methods of approximation.

The results indicate that exploratory innovation positively influences the firms to adopt CE practices. Whereas, exploitative innovation capability inhibits the adoption of CE practices.

This study guides business managers to focus on develop exploratory innovative capabilities before the adoption of CE practices. This study also provides guidance to policy maker about the role of regulatory mechanism plays to encourage/inhibits firms for adoption of CE practices.

This is first study to analyze the idiosyncratic behavior of the firms when subjected to stakeholder pressure for CE practices adoption. Innovative capabilities (exploratory/exploitative) are able to explain the reason for diverse response to stakeholder response.

Implementing sustainable practices in multi-tier supply chains (MTSCs) is a difficult task. This study aims to investigate why such endeavours fail and how MTSC partners can address them.

A single-case study of a global food retail company was used in this study. Semi-structured interviews with the case firm and its first- and second-tier suppliers were used to collect data, which were then qualitatively analysed using thematic analysis.

Major barriers impeding the implementation of sustainability in multi-tier food supply chains were revealed such as the cost of sustainability, knowledge gap, lack of infrastructure and supply chain complexity. Furthermore, the findings reveal five possible solutions such as multi-tier collaboration and partnership, diffusion of innovation along the chain, supply chain mapping, sustainability performance measurement and capacity building, all of which can aid in the improvement of sustainability practices.

Future research should investigate how specific barriers and drivers affect specific aspects of sustainability, pointing practitioners to specific links between the variables that can aid in tailoring sustainability oriented investment.

This research supports managerial comprehension of MTSC sustainability, pointing out ways to improve sustainability performance despite the complex multi-tier system of food supply chains.

The research on MTSC sustainability is still growing, and this research contributes to the debate about how MTSCs can become more sustainable from the perspective of the triple bottom line, particularly food supply chains which face significant sustainability challenges.