Key performance indicators for adopting sustainability practices in footwear supply chains

Abstract

The footwear industry has contributed notably to different countries’ economic development. Therefore, it needs to focus on operational excellence in order to achieve a sustainable level of development. Achieving sustainability in the footwear industry, however, is a complex task since various issues are involved in the footwear manufacturing process. Currently, in order to see how firms can sustain their place in the competitive global business environment, researchers and practitioners are giving special attention to operational excellence in the footwear manufacturing industry. Operational excellence is a business term that indicates the actual performance of an organization. To make the supply chain agile, resilient, and sustainable, it is imperative that firms incorporate sustainable practices in the footwear industry, and operational excellence can help in this regard. The sustainability of the footwear industry can be examined by using a set of key performance indicators (KPIs). Therefore, identifying and examining the KPIs for adopting sustainable practices in the footwear supply chain is a very important task. There is still a knowledge gap in research on the KPIs for attaining sustainability in the footwear industry. To fill in this knowledge gap, this study contributes to the existing literature by identifying and assessing the KPIs by using a novel multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method named the best-worst method (BWM). This study uses a previous study to identify some relevant KPIs, some of which were included in the assessment process based on footwear industry experts’ feedback. After finalizing the relevant KPIs, BWM was utilized to find the most important KPIs for adopting sustainability practices in the footwear industry’s supply chains. The findings of this study reveal that the KPIs “quality production”, “timely order processing” and “accuracy of moulding” received the first three positions in the rankings we performed. The results of this study will help practitioners, industry experts, and decision-makers to find out a pathway for easily adopting sustainability practices in the footwear supply chains.