Selection of resilient suppliers in manufacturing industries post-COVID-19: implications for economic and social sustainability in emerging economies

Purpose Selection of resilient suppliers has attracted the attention of researchers in the past one decade. The devastating effect of COVID-19 in emerging economies has provided great impetus to the selection of resilient suppliers. Under volatile and uncertain business scenarios, supplier selection is often done under imprecise and incomplete information, making the traditional decision-making methods ineffective. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the application of a fuzzy decision-making method for resilient supplier selection. Design/methodology/approach A group of three decision makers was considered for evaluating various alternatives (suppliers) based on their performance under different primary, sustainability and resilience criteria. Experts' opinion about each criterion and alternative was captured in linguistic terms and was modelled using fuzzy numbers. Then, an algorithm for solving resilient supplier selection problem based on the trapezoidal intuitionistic fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TrIFTOPSIS) was introduced and demonstrated through a case study. Findings A closeness coefficient was used to rank the suppliers based on their distances from intuitionistic fuzzy positive-ideal solution and intuitionistic fuzzy negative-ideal solution. Finally, the proposed fuzzy decision making model was applied to a real problem of supplier selection in the clothing industry. Originality/value The presented TrIFTOPSIS model provides an effective route to prioritise and select resilient suppliers under imprecise and incomplete information. This is the first application of intuitionistic fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making for resilient supplier selection.