A Sustainable Sourcing Process for Third-Party Supply Chain Activity Providers: A Systematic Literature Review

Due to vast global resource consumption, rapid technological changes and more demanding customers, supply chains are more knowledge-intensive, unstable, complicated and contain aspects of uncertainty for many organisations. Furthermore, as well as overcoming the tough circumstances above, organisations are required to increase the supply chain sustainability. However, to achieve sustainable development of the entire supply chain, all the organisations involved, including raw material and parts suppliers, third-party services and distributors, must be suitable sustainable. Therefore, previous criteria and methods for sourcing third party (3P) supply chain service providers, which use only economic and functional elements, are not suitable for modern supply chain requirements. Thus, an important topic for research to explore is the various criteria and methods for sourcing sustainable supply chain service providers. The purpose of this project research is to perform a systematic literature review of the criteria and the methods used in a sustainable sourcing process from academic articles published from 2008 to 2018. In particularly, the stages of selecting and evaluating logistics or manufacturing service providers since these supply chain activities are commonly outsourced to a third party. The research identified the criteria and methods which are commonly used for selecting sustainable third-party logistics or manufacturing providers and evaluating the sustainability performance of third party providers when executing logistics or manufacturing services for a supply chain. The findings revealed that a sustainable sourcing process requires buyers to use TBL categories and various sub-categories of criteria. Additionally, third party sustainable sourcing criteria lists require environmental and social aspects but, just as importantly, evolved economic sub-categories, such as alliance/relationship, due to the importance of having a strong relationship with third party service providers for supply chain sustainable development. Furthermore, multi-criteria decision making models were commonly used for the sourcing of suitably sustainable logistics and manufacturing providers