Sustainability in Supply Chain Through E-Procurement—An Assessment Framework Based on DANP and Liberatore Score

Sustainable procurement aims at integrating specifications and criteria in the purchasing process in favor of environment protection while ensuring resource efficiency, improvement in product or service quality, and cost minimization. Although e-procurement is originally adopted by the companies for cost and cycle time reduction, more recently, it has been also used as a tool to attain sustainable procurement. However, not much effort has been made so far to explicitly identify the factors that portray e-procurement as a tool for sustainable procurement and assess the level of sustainability after adoption of necessary practices. We have identified 26 driving factors based on the review of literature and analyze six major dimensions that help in managing sustainable purchasing programs through the use of information and communication technologies. To handle the interdependence among the criteria, we develop an assessment framework using a hybrid model that combines two multicriteria decision making techniques, namely, Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory based analytic network process and Liberatore score. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated with a real-life case study.