Analysis of core risk factors and potential policy options for sustainable supply chain: an MCDM analysis of Saudi Arabia's manufacturing industry.

Sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) has been a tough challenge for developing economies like Saudi Arabia. Implementation of SSCM practices in the manufacturing industry has been prone to multiple risk factors that need to be identified, evaluated, and prioritized especially considering the dynamics of the manufacturing industry in a developing economy. Moreover, it is also imperative to trace out feasible and sustainable strategies to overcome the risks to SSCM practices adoption. This study serves this purpose and identifies, evaluates, prioritizes the risk factors, sub-factors, and strategies to overcome these risk factors in the implementation of SSCM practices in the manufacturing industry in Saudi Arabia. An integrated multi-criteria decision analysis approach by combining fuzzy AHP and fuzzy WASPAS methods is employed for the analyses. The fuzzy AHP analysis results show that economic risks are dominant risks followed by the managerial policy risks and environmental risks in implementing SSCM. Industrial emissions are the leading risk factors in the overall ranking of the sustainable supply chain sub-risk factors followed by market dynamics, management policy failures, financial constraints, and credit uncertainty. While evaluating the sustainable supply chain strategies using fuzzy WASPAS, it is concluded that commitment and support of top, middle, and lower level management is the most pivotal strategy to deal with the risks to SSCM in Saudi Arabia followed by establishing environmental policies and goals to adopt SSCM, and provision of the financial resources and subsidies.