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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