Abstract:
Currently, leather industries of Bangladesh are facing considerable amount of pressure to adoption of sustainable supply chain management practices in traditional supply chain network. The approach of incorporating sustainable supply chain management practices in the traditional supply chain is becoming greatly important for the industry due to environmental awareness, competitiveness, and government environmental policies. Hence, SSCM implementation is a good practice of sustainable development in the competitive world market due to its consideration for environmental, social and economic issues. There are many barriers for adopting SSCM into leather processing industry of Bangladesh, but these barriers do not ensure similar impact for all industrial sector and countries. To bridge this gap, it is a crucial issue to identify most influential barriers to adopting SSCM practices. In order to implement SSCM practices, a careful analysis of the most common barriers that obstruct the whole process must be identified.
In this study, a numerous 35 barriers of SSCM implementation are identified through detailed literature review and deeper survey on leather processing industry. Most common 20 barriers are selected with the help of industrial and academic experts for the analysis of the cause-effect and prominence relationship among them. The main contribution of this study is to identify the key barriers and find out the cause-effect relationship among barriers to the implementation of SSCM in the leather processing industry of Bangladesh by using a blended grey based DEMATEL approach. The results of the thesis aim to support the leather processing industry in a way that the industrial manager can identify most influential barriers and this emerges as the crucial part of eradicating barriers. The results show that the ‘Lack of awareness of local customers in green products’ and ‘Lack of commitment from top management’ seem to be of greater priority in the casual group. Cause–effect relationship is plotted to facilitate decision maker to identify casual barriers that need attention during SSCM implementation in the traditional leather supply chain.
