Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review
Green supply chain decisions – Case-based performance analysis from the food industry
Introduction
Environmental sustainability related to supply chains is generally known as green logistics. There seems to be a general consensus about the benefits of green logistics (Meixell and Gargeya, 2005). Environmental advantages for companies include energy saving and cost reduction; economic reasons are fuel efficiency and resource savings.
However, there is a lack of empirical studies and management tools and models which connect environmental performance to general supply chain performance. Some attempts to understand this linkage have been presented by Azevedo et al. (2011), who studied the influence of green practices on supply chain performance by using a case study approach. Yang et al. (2013) studied Taiwanese container shipping companies and their policies. Making a profit requires supply chain management and an essential part of management systems is measuring.
There are a limited number of studies showing how logistics decisions affect not only the economic but also the environmental performance of company and supply chain performance. Some studies support this. For example, Srivastava (2007) claims that there is a growing need for integrating environmentally sound choices into supply chain management research and practice. Also McIntyre et al. (1998) have reported in Saadany et al. (2011) that “environmental concerns have been examined and treated separately in supply chain functions and there is as yet no integrative approach or mechanism that measures, controls, and improves the environmental aspects of an entire supply chain; a limitation that does not facilitate optimizing the green performance of a supply chain”.
Food supply chains present an important part of the global economy (Baldwin, 2012, Ghosh, 2010). The products are produced and consumed in every part of the world and the processes are related to the use of natural resources, employment, and emissions. Food supply chains present high volume, fast moving products which are accessible to consumers. Food products have certain specific features in terms of supply chain management (Bourlakis and Weightman, 2004) – food has a typically short shelf-life, and there are high requirements for traceability and cost pressure (Opara, 2003). According to Cohen and Garrett (2010), fragility and food security are a global phenomenon. Because of these reasons, food supply chains present an interesting research topic on the implementation of green logistics.
The purpose of this paper is to analyse green logistics decisions within the food industry by using a performance measurement framework and to compare alternative scenarios by using financial and environmental metrics. The research problem of the paper is to compare supply chain decisions and analyse where environmental effects are improving, together with cost efficiency and on-time delivery parameters, and when the impacts point to different directions. The remainder of the paper is as follows. Firstly, relevant literature on green supply chains and food supply chains is reviewed. Then three case studies are presented and analysed from the performance measuring point of view. Finally, a framework is presented in the conclusion section.
Section snippets
Literature
The literature review focuses on papers in the green supply chain management side and on performance measurement aspects which combine economic and green aspects.
Method
In order to analyse how supply chain decisions have an effect on green parameters and traditional supply chain metrics such as cost efficiency and on-time delivery, empirical data is collected by conducting a scenario analysis at food producing companies. A case study approach is used to analyse three different types of decisions related to economic and green parameters. For each case, a Supply Chain Operations Reference model (SCOR) type of metrics is introduced and current supply chain
Case A: Transportation crate system comparison
Case company A presents an example of the use of the sustainable supply chain performance evaluation model. It introduces a case study which illustrates a way to include environmental and social issues as a part of strategic supply chain decision-making. The case study describes the qualitative and quantitative strategic changes which the case food supply chain meets if disposable transportation boxes are replaced with recyclable transportation crates.
The company is a medium-sized food
Conclusions: toward integrated metrics
Green supply chain decisions can be connected to the performance analysis of supply chains. As multi-criteria decision making is already everyday balancing between cost, lead-time, and on-time delivery, adding environmental sustainability-related measures is an obvious next step for companies. Food as a fragile product, often with a short shelf-life, and large emissions from food waste are of great interest, because the speed of delivery seems to improve the carbon efficiency even if
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