CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS TO IMPLEMENTATION OF SPEED TO RECOVERY IN SUSTAINABLE SUPPLY CHAIN DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Global business today is unpredictable, and companies trying to create sustainable supply chains are struggling with many different types of catastrophe— geopolitical disruptions, climate-change-induced instability, pandemic level systemic failures and rapid changes in technology. The speed to recover (StR) is now considered an important capability of a supply chain; it measures how quickly a supply chain can get back to its baseline performance (or a better level) after a d isruption. There has been growing interest in supply chain resilience and supply chain sustainability but there is still limited knowledge about identifying and prioritizing critical success factors (CSFs) used to implement StR within the context of a sustainable supply chain; this gap in the academic literature remains largely unexplored.. In response to the gap in existing literature regarding how to develop a comprehensive criterion for CSF evaluation, this research constructs a decision making framework designed to integrate both methods of fuzzy DEMATEL (Fuzzy Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) for mapping out the causal structure of the interrelationships of CSFs, and TOPSIS (Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution) for ranking or prioritizing CSFs by how close they come to the ideal performance or benchmark. In utilizing both methodologies, this research was able to provide a more holistic decision supporting framework for individuals and organizations when evaluating CSFs than could be provided by each methodology used independently. A comprehensive two-phase literature synthesis yielded an initial pool of twenty candidate CSFs, subsequently refined to thirteen factors through a structured two-round Delphi expert validation process. Primary data were collected from a purposive sample of fifteen senior supply chain professionals representing diverse industry sectors including manufacturing, logistics, e-commerce, pharmaceutical, automotive, textile, food and beverage, chemical, and humanitarian supply chain operations. The Fuzzy DEMATEL analysis classified the thirteen CSFs into cause and effect groups. Six CSFs – Top Management Commitment, Organizational Resilience Culture, Digital iv Technology Adoption, Cross-Functional Collaboration, Environmental Regulatory Compliance, and Circular Economy Practices – were identified as cause-group factors functioning as primary systemic drivers. The subsequent TOPSIS analysis yielded a priority ranking in which Top Management Commitment (Ci* = 0.610), Organizational Resilience Culture (Ci* = 0.572), and Circular Economy Practices (Ci* = 0.565) emerged as the three most critical CSFs. Notably, the sustainability-oriented factors ranked among the top four across both methods, empirically validating the proposition that sustainability and supply chain resilience are complementary rather than competing strategic objectives. Findings indicate that proactive organizational investment in leadership commitment, cultural resilience orientation, digital infrastructure, and sustainability practices simultaneously accelerates recovery speed and strengthens long-term sustainability credentials. The integrated Fuzzy DEMATEL-TOPSIS framework provides supply chain managers with an actionable, evidence-based roadmap for sequential resource allocation and strategic capability development. Keywords: Critical Success Factors, Speed To Recovery, Sustainable Supply Chain Management, Fuzzy DEMATEL, TOPSIS, Supply Chain Resilience, Industry 4.0, Multi criteria Decision Making, Causal Analysis, Circular Economy.