The purpose of this research is to take an in-depth look at the Baldrige Award framework by analysing the nature and strength of relationships between the Baldrige criteria. This study facilitates the prominent role that quality awards such as the Baldrige play in the implementation of total quality management (TQM) systems. We aim to fill a gap in the literature by utilising the original independent review scores of the Baldrige Award applicants obtained from the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In addition, canonical correlation analysis is applied in order to evaluate the Baldrige Award framework from a new perspective. The findings confirm previous research that there is a strong relationship between all the Baldrige criteria. This paper specifically stresses the strong role of leadership in the Baldrige framework and provides managers with useful implications regarding the implementation of TQM practices. Companies need to bear in mind that concentrating on specific sections of the model is not adequate to attain excellence; instead a systematic approach that includes all elements of the framework should be adopted.

Sustainable supply chain management has received much attention form researchers and practitioners over the past decade owing to the increasing awareness regarding environmental and social issues. Accordingly, organisations come under pressure from a number of both internal and external sources including employees, customers, competitors, socially aware organisations, communities, governments, and non-governmental organisations to act in a more socially responsible way. As a result, more authors are beginning to address supplier selection problems in light of sustainability criteria. However, the interrelationships among sustainability supplier selection criteria have rarely been discussed in the research literature. This study is aimed primarily at finding and analysing such interactions. We made use of interpretive structural modelling to extract the interrelationships among sustainability criteria and fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory to determine the intensity of these relationships. A case study in the gas industry is presented to demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of the proposed approach.

The circular supply chain (CSC) plays a pivotal role in delivering sustainable products to end users, profoundly affecting organizational performance and societal welfare. In this ecosystem, effective Product Return Management (PRM) is crucial, as consumers play a pivotal role in returning used products for reuse or recycling. Despite its significance in waste reduction and attaining environmental and economic goals, scant research has explored product return barriers within CSC. This study bridges this gap by investigating and prioritising these barriers to enhance the circular economy. Employing a systematic literature review (SLR), we extracted and screened 13 product return barriers in CSC using the Grey Delphi method. Subsequently, we introduced an enhanced version of the Group Grey-Best–Worst Method (GG-BWM), a novel approach that harmonises expert judgments by addressing uncertainties through Grey Theory and incorporating both individual-level and group-level inconsistency ratios. The findings highlight lack of motivation, lack of consumer awareness, and lack of proper infrastructure as the most critical barriers. Furthermore, sensitivity analysis conducted across 11 scenarios emphasises the significance of our results. This study contributes to the group multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) methods and CSC literature, while offering actionable insights practitioners seeking to improve the effectiveness of their CSC strategies.