Identifying the Main Obstacles to Carrying Outbi-directional Contracts in Supply Chains by Adopting the Best-worst Method and Undertaking Weighted Aggregates Sum Product Assessment: A Fuzzy Approach

Since the obstacles to executing directional contracts have not been identified by previous research, the present study seeks to examine executive obstacles to carrying them out in supply chains. The purpose of this research is to investigate, identify and prioritize implementation obstacles of bi-directional contracts in the supply chain both in production and distribution contexts.

At the end of this study, barriers to the implementation of bi-directional contracts in the supply chain were examined. Ten criteria were identified including lack of employee training (with a weight of 57.64 percent), lack of motivation and employee involvement (48.82 percent), unwillingness to change (81.3 percent), lack of corporate social responsibility (63.09 percent),  management skills and knowledge (63.18 percent), lack of less perceived benefits (22.6 percent), fear of failure (61.5 percent), unclear organizational objective responsibility (32.36 percent), lack of integration and coordination benefits (20.73 percent), and political instability (22.3 percent).

As a case study of five car companies in Iran, the current study identified barriers to the implementation of bi-directional contracts in the supply chain. Examining the criteria, the study could identify which of the companies was ready to implement such types of contracts.

In this study, the effective factors and criteria in bi-directional contracts, as well as their prioritization and degree of importance in automotive companies, were identified and analyzed in a fuzzy environment. Finally, the results were analyzed by applying other decision-making methods. It was shown that the results are not much different from each other. This means that more experienced and up-to-date companies are always in the first ranks and are always better prepared to implement contracts of various types in the supply chain.