Evaluating Supply Chain Collaboration Barriers in Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Priom Mahmud, Sanjoy Kumar Paul, Abdullahil Azeem and Priyabrata Chowdhury
Additional contact information
Priom Mahmud: Department of Industrial and Production Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka 1000, Bangladesh
Sanjoy Kumar Paul: UTS Business School, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2007, Australia
Abdullahil Azeem: Department of Industrial and Production Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Dhaka 1000, Bangladesh
Priyabrata Chowdhury: School of Accounting, Information Systems and Supply Chain, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC 3000, Australia

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 13, 1-28

Abstract: The disruption has a significant impact on supply chain collaboration (SCC) which is an important task to improve performance for many enterprises. This is especially critical for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). We developed a decision-modeling framework for analyzing SCC barriers in SMEs for the emerging economy in Bangladesh. Through literature review and expert opinion survey, we have identified a comprehensive list of SCC barriers under four main categories, namely, information-related, communication-related, intra-organizational, and inter-organizational barriers. Then we applied the Grey DEMATEL and Fuzzy Best-Worst methods to evaluate these SCC barriers and compared the results. We also conducted a sensitivity analysis to assess the robustness of the proposed approach. The study reveals that lack of communication is the most crucial barrier in SCC, providing a model for assessing barriers in other emerging economies. This study contributes to the literature by analyzing SCC barriers and by comparing the results obtained from two different MCDM methods. The findings of this study can help decision-makers to plan for overcoming the most prioritized SCC barriers which ultimately contribute to improving the resilience and sustainability performances of SMEs.

Keywords: supply chain collaboration; resilience; small- and medium-sized enterprises; grey DEMATEL; fuzzy best-worst method (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/13/7449/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/13/7449/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:13:p:7449-:d:587734

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().