An integrated approach of sustainable procurement and procurement postponement for the multi-product, assemble-to-order (ATO) production system

Postponement strategy is mainly used to handle the perceived variety and actual variety of product in the most cost effective way. However, postponement strategy has never been used by researchers in procurement to reduce cost and to enhance overall flexibility of the process. This paper gives a new concept of postponement, called procurement postponement, which is considered to be effective for the multi-product, assemble-to-order (ATO) system. A two-stage integrated approach of sustainable procurement and postponement method is proposed for the multi-product ATO production system to deal demand uncertainty, green house gas (GHG) emission, reliability of supply, level of disassembly and social issues of supplier selection with intuitionsitic fuzzy analytic hierarchy (IF-AHP) and multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA). Case study of an Indian company is discussed to use the proposed method by cost-emission-decision matrix.