Sustainable Benchmarking of Supply Chains: The Case of the Food Industry

Natalia Yakovleva, Joseph Sarkis and Thomas Sloan

International Journal of Production Research, Vol. 50 No. 5, 1297-1317, 2012.

An organization’s long-term viability and competitiveness should not be evaluated solely in terms of financial measures.  Investors, policy makers, and other stakeholders increasingly seek to evaluate performance with respect to sustainability — the environmental, social, and economic performance of an organization.  But measuring and improving the sustainability performance of supply chains is challenging.  We introduce a framework to help evaluate sustainability performance of supply chains.  We have collected sustainability data on food supply chains within the United Kingdom.  These data are then transformed into indicators.  In addition, as part of this benchmarking framework and to more accurately determine performance of food supply chains, we have utilized food supply chain experts’ opinions about which factors contribute the most to sustainability.  Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), these opinions are translated into importance ratings.  The indicators are weighted by these importance ratings to generate an overall index of sustainability.  Stakeholders can use the index to evaluate supply chains, and supply chain members can use this approach to guide improvement efforts.  Strengths and opportunities, as well as limitations of the methodology are discussed, and sensitivity analysis is performed.

Keywords: Environment, Supply Chain, Green Supply Chain, Food, Benchmarking, Sustainability, Sustainable Supply Chain

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