Building Sustainable Supply Chains for Organizations Based on QFD: A Case Study

Environmental protection has been increasingly emphasized by stakeholders, including social organizations, the government, and the public. As a result, building a sustainable supply chain has now become a part of social corporate responsibility as well as a challenge for firms, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Taking a chemical enterprise (called enterprise C, in this paper) as an example, this paper uses quality function deployment (QFD) techniques and sets up a house of quality (HOQ) to investigate how a SME can achieve sustainable supply chain management. Specifically, in this paper we build a performance measurement system focusing on economic performance, environmental performance, and social performance. These three types of performance measure, in turn, include fifty-nine secondary indicators. Furthermore, an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been adopted to calculate the weight of each indicator. Benchmarking has also been used, to determine how much the enterprise should improve on each indicator. Based on the HOQ model, we conclude that avoiding waste, recycling resources, and sustainable exploitation are most important internal abilities of enterprise C.