scholarly journals Exploring Supplier Sustainability Audit Standards: Potential for and Barriers to Standardization

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (19) ◽  
pp. 8223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain J. Fraser ◽  
Julia Schwarzkopf ◽  
Martin Müller
Keyword(s):  
Supply Chain ◽  
Supply Chain Management ◽  
Supply Chains ◽  
Sustainable Supply Chain ◽  
Audit Process ◽  
Chain Management ◽  
Sustainability Initiatives ◽  
Audit Activity ◽  
Audit Standards ◽  
Insight Into

Global focal companies are increasingly required and expected to monitor the sustainability risks and activities in their supply chains, which has resulted in increasing supplier sustainability audit activity and growth in the number of sustainability initiatives/associations. While common, shared audit standards were originally conceived to reduce audit fatigue; with overlapping and converging supply chains there could be a need for cross-recognition or standardisation of supplier audit standards. This research aims to provide empirically grounded insight into sustainability audit activity, audit processes and standards for suppliers and the extent to which they overlap. Audit standards employed by eight multi-brand, voluntary sustainability initiatives/associations, focusing on supply chain sustainability (SMETA, PSCI, ICTI, FWF, ASI, JAC, amforiBSCI and RBA) were inductively analysed. This research compares the audit processes and standards, detecting common audit categories, analysing points of overlap and difference. We find empirical evidence of significant growth in supplier sustainability audit activity. We also find overlap among the standards in terms of audit process and steps, as well as at the level of audit focus categories. Deeper analysis reveals large differences at the granular level in terms of questions asked to assess specific topics. We conclude that there is potential for standardisation and cross-recognition but that significant barriers to agreement at the level of audit questions and how topics are evaluated remain. This research provides a first empirical overview of this important tool and its application in various industries for sustainable supply chain management.

Sustainable Supply Chain Management

2011 ◽  
pp. 136-152
Author(s):  
Iskra Dukovska-Popovska ◽  
Malcolm Bertoni ◽  
Hans-Henrik Hvolby ◽  
Paul Turner ◽  
Kenn Steger-Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Supply Chain ◽  
Information Systems ◽  
Supply Chain Management ◽  
Supply Chains ◽  
Environmental Drivers ◽  
Sustainable Supply Chain ◽  
Green Logistics ◽  
Chain Management ◽  
Sustainable Supply Chain Management ◽  
Efficiency Cost

Integrating environmental considerations into supply-chain management has become an increasingly important issue for industry, government and academic researchers. Supply chain managers are being required to respond to the challenges of new legislation, standards and regulations; changing customer demands; drivers for efficiency, cost effectiveness and return on investment; while simultaneously being ‘green’. The fundamental tension between business and environmental drivers is difficult, but critical to understanding how to effectively re-engineer and re-design existing supply chains in a manner that is sustainable both financially and environmentally. Information systems have a significant role to play in supporting corporate responses to environmental management and the development of holistic green logistic solutions. This chapter examines contemporary discussions on the current state of sustainable supply-chain management and green logistics. It presents a case study from the Fujitsu Corporation in Japan and explores models of information systems and RFID use in green logistics. Combining insights from the case and existing models the chapter explores an example of how a combined model can be used to explore the potential of a specific emerging technology (RFIDs) in ‘greening’ supply chains.

Recent Developments in Green Supply Chain Management

2017 ◽  
pp. 191-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay R. Brown ◽  
Maxim A. Bushuev ◽  
Andrey A. Kretinin ◽  
Alfred L. Guiffrida
Keyword(s):  
Supply Chain ◽  
Supply Chain Management ◽  
Supply Chains ◽  
Decision Models ◽  
Sustainable Supply Chain ◽  
Sustainable Business ◽  
Chain Management ◽  
Sustainable Supply Chains ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Day To Day Operations

In today's supply chains, green and sustainable business practices have become an integral part of long-term strategy as well as the day-to-day operations, and sourcing and logistics play fundamental roles in ensuring the success of sustainable supply chains. In this chapter, we review recent research on three classes of decision models that are used in the logistics and sourcing functions of sustainable supply chains. Specifically, we examine and summarize recent developments in sustainable decision models for supplier selection, inventory lot-sizing, and last-mile delivery. Our review of the green and sustainable features found in these three models results in a single-source consolidation of models used in sustainable sourcing and logistics. This review may prove useful to researchers who focus on sustainable supply chain management and to practitioners who seek to expand their toolkit of models for the management and control of their supply chain.

scholarly journals Transparency for Multi-Tier Sustainable Supply Chain Management: A Case Study of a Multi-tier Transparency Approach for SSCM in the Automotive Industry

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 1814 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain J. Fraser ◽  
Martin Müller ◽  
Julia Schwarzkopf
Keyword(s):  
Supply Chain ◽  
Supply Chain Management ◽  
Supply Chains ◽  
Automotive Industry ◽  
Raw Material ◽  
Sustainable Supply Chain ◽  
Chain Management ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Sustainability Problems

Sustainability in supply chain management (SSCM) has become established in both academia and increasingly in practice. As stakeholders continue to require focal companies (FCs) to take more responsibility for their entire supply chains (SCs), this has led to the development of multi-tier SSCM (MT-SSCM). Much extant research has focused on simple supply chains from certain industries. Recently, a comprehensive traceability for sustainability (TfS) framework has been proposed, which outlines how companies could achieve MT-SSCM through traceability. Our research builds on this and responds to calls for cases from the automotive industry by abductively analysing a multi-tier supply chain (MT-SC) transparency case study. This research analyses a raw material SC that is particularly renowned for sustainability problems—the cobalt supply chain for electric vehicles—and finds that the extant literature has oversimplified the operationalisation of transparency in MT-SSCM. We compare the supply chain maps of the MT-SC before and after an auditing and mapping project to demonstrate the transparency achieved. Our findings identify challenges to the operationalisation of SC transparency and we outline how FCs might set to increase MT-SC transparency for sustainability.

scholarly journals Drivers of Sustainable Supply Chain Management: Identification and Classification

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 1137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Saeed ◽  
Wolfgang Kersten
Keyword(s):  
Supply Chain ◽  
Supply Chain Management ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Supply Chain Network ◽  
Sustainable Supply Chain ◽  
Chain Management ◽  
Sustainable Supply Chain Management ◽  
Sustainable Solutions ◽  
Sustainability Practices ◽  
Sustainability Initiatives

With the increase in awareness of environmental and social issues associated with the development and the use of products, stakeholders—especially consumers—are showing more concern regarding these issues. To address new developments and changing trends, organizations are now compelled to identify and implement innovative and sustainable solutions, not only within their organizations’ boundaries, but also across the whole supply chain network. The primary goal of this paper was to identify and analyze drivers of sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) that influence or encourage organizations to undertake sustainability initiatives and implement sustainable solutions throughout their supply chains. For this purpose, a systematic literature review was conducted and 1559 drivers of SSCM were identified from 217 journal articles. Precise interpretation, clear definitions, restructuring, and classification into external and internal driver categories produced a list of 40 unique drivers of SSCM. The results revealed that regulatory and market pressures, with reference to the number of citations, are the most prevailing drivers of SSCM for the implementation of sustainability practices. Classification of the drivers of SSCM into primary and secondary driver categories may assist practitioners and decision makers in prioritizing sustainability-related initiatives and adopting sustainability practices across the whole supply chain network.

Product Deletion and Sustainable Supply Chains

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qingyun Zhu ◽  
Joseph Sarkis
Keyword(s):  
Supply Chain ◽  
Supply Chain Management ◽  
Supply Chains ◽  
Portfolio Management ◽  
Product Portfolio ◽  
Chain Process ◽  
Sustainable Supply Chain ◽  
Chain Management ◽  
Sustainable Supply Chains ◽  
Design And Manufacture

Products and their associated material, capital, and information are critical flows within supply chains. Supply chain management needs to facilitate product portfolio management. Some example activities include material sourcing, product design and manufacture, product delivery and transportation, product usage, and service. Closing the supply-chain loop, especially for sustainable supply chains, include end-of-life disposal and repurposing activities. Sustainable supply chain development typically focuses on three major dimensions of organizational competitiveness, economic, social, and environmental. Organizations make product deletion continuously. These decisions can profoundly contribute to sustainability. Alternatively, sustainability performance of various supply chain process and product or material flows may also be strategic product deletion reasons. This chapter will review the integration of product deletion with sustainable supply chain management. It will entail the impact of product deletion on sustainable supply chains.

Supply chain corruption practices circumventing sustainability standards: wolves in sheep's clothing

2020 ◽  
Vol 40 (12) ◽  
pp. 1873-1907
Author(s):  
Bruno S. Silvestre ◽  
Fernando Luiz E. Viana ◽  
Marcelo de Sousa Monteiro
Keyword(s):  
Supply Chain ◽  
Supply Chain Management ◽  
Supply Chains ◽  
Secondary Data ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sustainable Supply Chain ◽  
Chain Management ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Sustainability Standards ◽  
Business Corruption

PurposeA growing number of private, voluntary and mandatory sustainability standards have recently emerged. However, supply chain corruption practices as mechanisms to circumvent sustainability standards have also grown and occur regularly. This paper strives to elaborate theory on the intersection of institutional theory, business corruption and the sustainability standards literature by investigating factors that influence the emergence of supply chain corruption practices.Design/methodology/approachBased on secondary data, four in-depth case studies of supply chain corruption practices are investigated through the use of adaptive theory and the method of constant comparisons to elaborate theory on this important phenomenon.FindingsThe paper suggests that although sustainability standards can improve supply chain sustainability performance, if they are adopted only symbolically and not substantively, unanticipated outcomes such as supply chain corruption may occur. The study proposes a typology of supply chain corruption practices, further explores the symbolic adoption of sustainability standards in supply chains and proposes the novel construct of “social isomorphism for corruption.” Since focal companies play central roles in leading supply chain corruption practices, we reason that they can also play a pivotal role in preventing supply chain corruption practices by promoting the substantive adoption of sustainability standards across their supply chains.Originality/valueThis paper elaborates theory on the challenging phenomenon of corruption in supply chains by linking the supply chain management literature to the corruption and the sustainability discourses and offers important insights to aid our understanding on the topic. It generates six propositions and four contributions to the sustainable supply chain management theory, practice and policy.

The Use of Multi-Agent Systems in Managing Sustainable Supply Chain

2013 ◽  
Vol 315 ◽  
pp. 108-112
Author(s):  
Majid Aarabi ◽  
Muhamad Zameri Mat Saman ◽  
Kuan Yew Wong
Keyword(s):  
Supply Chain ◽  
Supply Chain Management ◽  
Supply Chains ◽  
Sustainable Supply Chain ◽  
Multi Agent Systems ◽  
Chain Management ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Goods And Services ◽  
Proposed Model ◽  
Multi Agent

The main purposes and challenges in supply chain management are reducing cost and time. Significantly, factors such as the competition of markets in the globe, limitation of energy, raw and virgin materials, environmental protection crisis and increasing of global population dramatically are causing unprecedented issues for the worldwide supply chains for providing goods and services to customers efficiently and effectively. The sustainability approach for Supply Chain Management (SCM) considers the 6Rs principles in four main stages of the supply chains: Pre-manufacture, Manufacture, Use and Post-use. The use of Multi-Agent System (MAS) prepares the most important requirements of an effective sustainable supply chain. At the same time, this agent-based approach provides reliable and agile systems, which will enable enterprises to accommodate ever changing needs of their customers in the future. In this article, the use of MAS for optimal Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM) is reviewed and the integrated functioning of certain agents resulting in information sharing is also demonstrated. With this idea, an attempt is made to provide a MAS model for the SSCM. In the proposed model, each agent performs a specific function of the organization and shares information with other agents. In order to describe this multi-agent based approach, a simple case study is given to illustrate the sustainable supply chain operations.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document