Optimizing Investments in Apparel Supply Chains: A Decision Model for Country Selection

Supply chain challenges have been significantly affected by both demand and supply on a global level. The selection of manufacturing countries has become critical to firms and their boards, even more so coming out of the COVID-19 global pandemic. The present study focuses on how firms select countries and regions to de-risk future global apparel sourcing, as countries that have been dependable in the past may not be in the future based on frequent environmental jolts, legacy supply chain failures, shifting government policy, and extreme volatility. The result of this study is a decision model for manufacturing country selection. This research was focused on the apparel industry; however, further research may indicate that it is applicable to other industries. A group of criteria was selected, the relative significance of these criterion was determined using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). The AHP methodology was applied in a case study as a decision-making tool to enable decision-makers to assess the most suitable countries for manufacturing country selection. The result of this study is a decision model for manufacturing country selection based on multiple criteria weighted by industry experts using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). In developing the model we utilize data from 61 countries representing over 95% of all the global apparel exports, with criteria utilized originating from 10 indices.