Supply Chain
The Importance Of A Sustainable Supply Chain
Discover the 4 types of sustainable supply chains.
Sustainability is playing an increasingly significant role in planning and management within organizations and across supply chains.
Supply chain management is defined as :
“the systemic, strategic coordination of the traditional business functions and the tactics across these business functions within a particular company and across businesses within the supply chain, for the purposes of improving the long-term performance of the individual companies and the supply chain as a whole” (Grzybowska & Kovács, 2014).
SC structure defines the way various organizations within the SC are arranged and related to each other.
The SC structure falls into four main types:
- Convergent: each node in the chain has at least one successor and several predecessors.
- Divergent: each node has at least one predecessor and several successors.
- Conjoined: which is a combination of each convergent chain and one divergent chain.
- Network: This cannot be classified as convergent, divergent or conjoined, and is more complex than the three previous types (Grzybowska & Kovács, 2014).
SSCs are essential to sustain modern business growth and ensure a healthy market environment.
In contrast to traditional SCM, which typically focuses on economic and financial business performance, sustainable SCM (SSCM) is characterized by explicit integration of environmental and/or social objectives which extend the economic dimension to the TBL.
In this context, SSCM focuses on the forward SC only and is complemented by closed-loop SCM, including reverse logistics, remanufacturing, and product recovery (Grzybowska & Kovács, 2014).
Sustainable SCM is the management of material, information, and capital flow as well as cooperation among companies along the supply chain while integrating goals from all three dimensions of sustainable development, i.e., economic, environmental, and social, which are derived from customer and stakeholder requirements.
In sustainable supply chains, environmental and social criteria need to be fulfilled by the members to remain within the supply chain, while it is expected that competitiveness would be maintained through meeting customer needs and related economic criteria (Grzybowska & Kovács, 2014).
References
- Grzybowska, K., Kovács G. Sustainable Supply Chain — Supporting Tools. Proceedings of the 2014 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems pp. 1321–1329.
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About The Author
Noor is a second-year business student at Tredu. She is also studying for a Diploma in International Smart Industry at Tampere University. She is passionate about marketing and content creation. She recently launched her YouTube channel specializing in holistic healing.
