Cagno E.

Lepri M.

Neri Alessandra

Trianni A.

Archivio istituzionale della ricerca - Politecnico di Milano

 1 8th International EurOMA Sustainable Operations and Supply Chain Forum La Rochelle Business School - Excelia Group 22nd and 23rd March 2021  Improving Sustainability in Supply Chains: An Integrated Analysis of Barriers, Drivers and Performance Alessandra Neri (alessandra.neri@polimi.it) Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering,  Politecnico di Milano, Italy  Enrico Cagno Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering,  Politecnico di Milano, Italy  Andrea Trianni Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney, Australia  Marco Lepri Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Italy   Keywords: Sustainability; Supply Chain; Multiple Perspectives Decision-Making.   Purpose Being sustainability a key competitive factor, supply chains (SCs) should adopt interventions to enhance their sustainability-related performance.  Understanding the decision-making process related to interventions’ adoption is fundamental, particularly addressing: i) Perspectives of multiple industrial decision-makers within the SC over the adoption process, that might diverge (Cagno et al., 2018);  ii) Barriers and drivers impacting on the adoption process, and industrial sustainability performance measurement at a single tier and SC level (Taticchi et al., 2015);  iii) Presence of specific features of SCs impacting the adoption process, namely contextual variables (Shibin et al., 2017). Newly to the extant literature (Macchion et al., 2017; Tuni et al., 2020), we investigated the adoption process of sustainability interventions in SC through an integrated framework. We focused simultaneously on barriers, drivers and performance perceived by multiple decision-makers within the SC with different perspectives over sustainability; we considered economic, environmental and social aspects, while also understanding possible patterns according to contextual variables. Figure 1 reports a graphical representation of the framework.   2  Figure 1. The integrated framework of analysis.  3  Methodology The empirical exploratory investigation, based on the case study methodology, addressed European SCs. Five industrial SCs, heterogeneous for sectors and number of tiers were investigated (details are reported in Table 1).   SC Sector Tiers A Metalworking 3 B  Automotive 4 C  Plastic 2 D  Textile 3 E Metal furniture 3 Table 1. Details on the SCs investigated.    Findings The results show that evaluating the adoption process through the integrated framework is needed for capturing a complete understanding of the dynamics laying behind the decision-making.  The main barriers perceived are internal to the firm and mainly related to the expertise; the drivers appear principally referred to regulatory, and integration/cooperation aspects; performance measured are still chiefly addressing economic side of sustainability. Differences among the perceived barriers, drivers and performance nonetheless exist and appear influenced by specific contextual variables.  The presence of multiple perspectives on barriers, drivers and performance, and their alignment or divergence seem to be affected by contextual variables as well. Particularly, variables related to the level of integration, exposure to stakeholders, configuration, dictatorship, and internal dependencies emerged among the most relevant ones, leading to an overall different way of addressing and managing sustainability in SCs.  Practical implications The proposed framework allows to get an insight into the factors influencing the decision-making process. It supports decision-makers in undertaking reasoned actions towards enhanced sustainability; shaping industrial systems towards the exploitation of benefits of specific variables, i.e. specific SCs’ features. Parallelly, it might support policymakers in promoting actions to stimulate the adoption of industrial sustainability interventions within SCs. Future research streams are offered as further investigations are necessary as a sample enlargement for statistical generalizability; a structured and systematic characterization of contextual variables.  4  Contribution The contribution of the research lies in the development of an integrated approached towards a multi-faceted problem and in providing a first exploratory analysis, from a strong sustainability perspective, in multi tiers SCs.    References Cagno, E., Neri, A. and Trianni, A. (2018), “Broadening to sustainability the perspective of industrial decision-makers on the energy efficiency measures adoption: some empirical evidence”, Energy Efficiency, Energy Efficiency, Vol. 11 No. 5, pp. 1193–1210. Macchion, L., Moretto, A., Caniato, F., Caridi, M., Danese, P., Spina, G. and Vinelli, A. (2017), “Improving innovation performance through environmental practices in the fashion industry: the moderating effect of internationalisation and the influence of collaboration”, Production Planning & Control, Vol. 28 No. 3, pp. 190–201. Shibin, K.T., Gunasekaran, A. and Dubey, R. (2017), “Explaining sustainable supply chain performance using a total interpretive structural modeling approach”, Sustainable Production and Consumption, Vol. 12, pp. 104–118. Taticchi, P., Garengo, P., Nudurupati, S.S., Tonelli, F. and Pasqualino, R. (2015), “A review of decision-support tools and performance measurement and sustainable supply chain management”, International Journal of Production Research, Vol. 53 No. 21, pp. 6473–6494. Tuni, A., Rentizelas, A. and Chinese, D. (2020), “An integrative approach to assess environmental and economic sustainability in multi-tier supply chains”, Production Planning and Control, Taylor & Francis, Vol. 31 No. 11–12, pp. 861–882.  

Improving Sustainability in Supply Chains: An Integrated Analysis of Barriers, Drivers and Performance

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