Building sustainable supply chains in the Textile, Clothing and Leather Sectors

In the last years sustainable supply chain management has gained an increasingly important role for firms competing in the Textile, Clothing and Leather (TCL) sectors, by working with their suppliers to systematically monitor, measure and communicate the benefits of cleaner and more socially responsible business, leading companies are starting to turn supply chain sustainability into a driver of competitive advantage. In literature, several studies have been reported by researchers to evaluate environmental and social performance of suppliers. However, a comprehensive dashboard that TCL companies could use for measuring and controlling suppliers’ sustainability performance is still missing. In this paper, a coherent set of KPIs for the systematic inclusion of sustainability factors in suppliers’ selection and performance evaluation by TCL companies is proposed. The set of KPIs proposed in this paper is based on a two-step approach. In step 1, the criteria and KPIs for evaluating environmental performance are identified through a systematic literature review. In step 2, a panel of academic experts have been involved in order to provide KPIs ratings. Redundancy Model (RM) and Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) methodologies have been adopted to eliminate redundancies and calculate weights, allowing the selection of the most suitable KPIs, in order to evaluate alternative suppliers. The latter represents alternatives' relative ability to achieve the decision goal, allowing a straightforward consideration of sustainability into suppliers’ evaluation, selection and monitoring. Most TCL companies now recognize that a sustainable supply chain is no longer just an optional nice-to-have: it is a business imperative, critical to the success of the organization as a whole in a perilous world. In this paper, a novel dashboard that can be practically used by TCL companies for valuating suppliers’ sustainability performance is introduced.