Abstract

The international business environments advocate green outsourcing performance (GOP) as fundamental enablers and criteria for the competitiveness of original equipment manufacturing (OEM) firms. Few studies providing integrated competitive advantages, enablers and criteria (called measures), exist, and are suitable for practical adoption to enhance GOP. This study presents an original approach to identify the most appropriate method that firms should implement, starting from competitive advantages to internal processes in an intensive market. The approach is based on quality function deployment (QFD), and in particular, all measures with interdependence relationships are given qualitative preferences, which are rarely applied in the literature. The whole scaffold exploits fuzzy set theory and analytical network processes to translate linguistic preferences required for interdependence relationships into numerical values; the QFD translates the result into a final criteria ranking system. A case study, grounded on data available from an OEM electronic firm, is proposed and discussed to show the application of the developed tool.

Key words: Quality function deployment, green outsourcing performance, analytical network process, fuzzy set theory.