A methodology to assess social sustainability of multi-tier supply chains in the textile industry

Social sustainability is a crucial aspect of Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM), particularly in the textile industry, due to numerous disasters that have occurred in garment factories, often in developing countries. Furthermore, the textile supply chain presents critical working conditions that demand attention. Thus, fashion and textile companies are urged to implement social risk management practices. This work develops a MCDM model for Sustainable Supplier Selection (SSS) and Sustainable Supplier Evaluation (SSE) using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). The model presents a risk-based approach implementing both non-compensatory and compensatory techniques to assess the social sustainability of suppliers. The evaluation is based on the Higg Facility Social and Labor Module (Higg FSLM), which is the dominant social auditing program in the textile industry. Additionally, an Aggregation Methodology is developed to allocate the performance of sub-suppliers to higher-tier suppliers, from Tier-4 to Tier-1. The proposed method was applied to the case study of Benetton Group, an Italian fashion company. This method demonstrated its effectiveness in evaluating and ranking suppliers based on their social performance and it is expected to represent a useful tool for sustainability managers. A sensitivity analysis was performed to demonstrate the importance of choosing the appropriate weights and scores. Notably, this work develops the first methodology to quantitatively assess social sustainability in multi-tier supply chains in the textile industry. It also enables to combine a robust social sustainability assessment method based on the Higg FSLM with the internal sustainability risk strategies of focal companies.