A Study of Selecting Criteria for Material Substitution under Green Environmental Consideration

To avoid global warming, climate change is actually a major challenge of human being. Enterprises shall take environmental issues into consideration when they engage in product design and operations management. Due to the trend of mass customization, the product structure is no longer stable and seldom changed. Actually, it’s a common use strategy to adopt material substitution to fulfill customers’ needs. However, there are many considerations when making the decision of adopting material substitution. This study concludes 21 factors for checking the decision effectiveness of material substitution. These factors can be classified into five categories: cost, quality, time, flexibility, and environment. Then, we use the 21 factors to construct an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) model and analyze their impact weighting. The results indicate that quality is the most important criterion for all of the studied companies in making decisions for material substitution. The items that used to be the significant factors in making material substitution decision are ‘the supplier’s capability’ and ‘quality improvement’. From the viewpoint of enterprises engaged in sustainable policy for a long time, the major factors used to decide the material substitution is whether the material substitution meets the green design requirements.