Evaluation on risks of sustainable supply chain based on integrated rough DEMATEL in Tunisian dairy industry

Recently, sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) has grown considerably at agro-food supply chain (AFSC). Due to their complex nature, these supply chains are exposed to a variety of interrelated risks from natural disasters and man-made. Hence, one of the fundamental concerns in the AFSC is identifying and prioritizing risks to achieve sustainability. However, in analyzing sustainability concerns, most previous studies have paid less attention to interrelationship between sustainability and risk assessment. The objective of this work is to propose a methodology to supply chain sustainability risk assessment by evaluating environmental, economic, social and operational risks. The proposed approach is an integrated rough decision- making and trial evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method for solving this problem, which takes into account the interrelationship between different risks and the group preference variety. The proposed methodology integrates the strength of DEMATEL approach in exploring both internal strength and external influence of risks as well as the advantage of rough number in manipulating the vagueness of information. A real-world case study of a Tunisian dairy company is presented to test the applicability of the proposed framework. It can be observed from results that the most important risks are “Large number of intermediaries”, “Lack of proper storage facilities” and “Transport disruption”. The results and findings can help the dairy sector decision-makers in a variety of ways to successfully identify and prioritize supply chain risks in order to attain sustainability.