Statistical Methods for Sustainability Measurement of Supply Chain Management

Sustainability is of essential interest for many organizations and is defined as the ability to maintain existing resources at a certain rate or level when encountered with barriers. Factors affecting sustainability are categorized as enablers (capacities) and barriers (challenges) that have positive and negative effects on sustainability, respectively. To evaluate the status of sustainability, organizations need a measurement method to account for all the aspects of the sustainability classified into social, economic, and environmental tiers. Previously, many researchers have provided indicators for measuring sustainability in specific fields, which is not applicable to organizations operating in other areas. The main purposes of this research are to investigate how statistical methods are used to improve previous methods of sustainability measurement as well as to propose a new approach to sustainability measurement at organizational and supply chain management (SCM) levels. Emphasis is particularly devoted to determining how the sustainability of supply chains may be measured in the presence of exponentially distributed indicators for both independent and dependent variable cases.