ASSESSMENT OF MAJOR RISKS IN APPAREL SUPPLY CHAIN USING FUZZY AHP METHOD – A CASE STUDY IN BANGLADESH

Supply chain risk management is a crucial part of any strategy across all sorts of industries. The apparel industry in Bangladesh have a great contribution on its total GDP (gross domestic product). Due to the sophisticated nature of the industry, a number of risks have been associated to its supply chain. These risks and their sources disturb the apparel supply chain to function optimally and decline its overall performance. Therefore, identifying the critical risks of apparel supply chain and its prioritization is very important. The present research aims at identifying and prioritizing the risks relevant to apparel supply chain. The major risks were identified based on the literature review and responses from the industrial experts. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (fuzzy AHP) was employed to analyze the risks and determine their ranking. In this work, the results indicate that supply risk is the most critical one followed by operational risk and demand risk. The least importance is given to the environmental risk. A sensitivity analysis is also conducted to examine the stability of the priority ranking made and the results show that the rankings remain unchanged due to any variations of the normalized weight for a particular criterion.