TY - JOUR
T1 - Complex investment decisions using rough set and fuzzy c-means
T2 - An example of investment in green supply chains
AU - Bai, Chunguang
AU - Dhavale, Dileep
AU - Sarkis, Joseph
PY - 2016/1/16
Y1 - 2016/1/16
N2 - Green supplier development focuses on helping organizations integrate activities to improve the natural environmental performance of their supply chains. These green-supplier-development programs require substantial resources and investments by a buyer company. Investigation into investment management in this context has only begun. This paper introduces a methodology to help manage investment in green-supplier-development and business-supplier-development practices. Managing these practices and their outcomes requires managing of a large sets of data. We propose a combination of rough set theoretic and fuzzy clustering means (FCM) approaches; first to simplify, and then sharpen the focus on the complex environment of evaluation of the investment decisions. The combined methodology, based on performance measures of supplier practices and agreed-upon investment objectives, identifies a set of guidelines that can help make decisions about sound investments in the supplier practices more effectively and judiciously. Various steps involved in the methodology are illustrated through using an example developed to highlight the salient steps and issues of the methodology. We show how the results may be interpreted to obtain many insights useful from both practical and research perspectives. Although the impetus to developing this methodology came from sustainability considerations, the methodology is general enough to be applicable in other areas where management and evaluation of investments is based on large data sets.
AB - Green supplier development focuses on helping organizations integrate activities to improve the natural environmental performance of their supply chains. These green-supplier-development programs require substantial resources and investments by a buyer company. Investigation into investment management in this context has only begun. This paper introduces a methodology to help manage investment in green-supplier-development and business-supplier-development practices. Managing these practices and their outcomes requires managing of a large sets of data. We propose a combination of rough set theoretic and fuzzy clustering means (FCM) approaches; first to simplify, and then sharpen the focus on the complex environment of evaluation of the investment decisions. The combined methodology, based on performance measures of supplier practices and agreed-upon investment objectives, identifies a set of guidelines that can help make decisions about sound investments in the supplier practices more effectively and judiciously. Various steps involved in the methodology are illustrated through using an example developed to highlight the salient steps and issues of the methodology. We show how the results may be interpreted to obtain many insights useful from both practical and research perspectives. Although the impetus to developing this methodology came from sustainability considerations, the methodology is general enough to be applicable in other areas where management and evaluation of investments is based on large data sets.
KW - 512 Business and Management
KW - Investment management
KW - Green supplier development
KW - Large data sets
KW - Rough set theory
KW - Fuzzy clustering means
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84942293882&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.ejor.2015.07.059
DO - 10.1016/j.ejor.2015.07.059
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84942293882
SN - 0377-2217
VL - 248
SP - 507
EP - 521
JO - European Journal of Operational Research
JF - European Journal of Operational Research
IS - 2
ER -