Assessing the Comprehensiveness of Supply Chain Environmental Strategies

As environmental awareness grows, firms are expected to expand the scope of their environmental strategies beyond organisational boundaries and to address more comprehensively environmental issues in their supply chains and product life cycles. Drawing on different literature streams, international standards and corporate disclosure, this paper presents a conceptual framework for the quantitative assessment of the comprehensiveness of firms' environmental strategies. This framework allows us to capture: (i) the environmental inputs and outputs addressed, (ii) the firm versus supply chain orientation of environmental strategies, and (iii) the environmental management practices adopted by companies. We illustrate the application of this framework with a content analysis of corporate sustainability reports for a cross-sectoral sample of sustainability leaders. Our results indicate that there is a need for greater specificity in environmental reporting and that, overall, companies remain firm-oriented. It is also observed that supply chain orientation can generally be associated with stakeholder pressure. Copyright (c) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Corporate Environmental Strategies

Joana Maria Comas Marti

Stakeholders increasingly demand firms to manage their sustainability performance in a comprehensive manner. Companies are expected to surpass regulatory requirements and address sustainability issues in their extended supply chains and along the life cycles of their products. The need for comprehensive approaches in environmental management constitutes the underlying motivation for the three research projects presented in this dissertation. The first research project provides an explicit assessment of the supply chain vs. firm orientation of corporate environmental strategies. To conduct this assessment, an original typology of environmental management practices is developed and used in a content analysis of corporate sustainability reports. The second research project studies carbon footprint and supply chain responsiveness trade-offs in strategic network design using mathematical modelling and optimisation tools. A model for the cost-effective definition of carbon abatement strategies is proposed. Using this model, the effect of carbon policies on costs and network configuration is analysed for both functional and innovative products. Numerical analyses illustrate the relevance of product innovativeness in the definition of different types of carbon targets and explore the traditional equivalence between price and quantity instruments. Finally, having conducted in-depth interviews and a broad survey, the third research project presents managers’ perspectives on ecolabelling and empirically studies the adoption of ecolabels by firms. Practitioners’ views on ecolabelling’s benefits, reasons for scepticism, the challenges ahead and their recommendations are discussed. Using regression analysis, different factors explaining the adoption of ecolabels by firms are identified.

EPFL2012

Sustainable Food Supply

Simone Lydia Voldrich

In the context of a growing world population, the fundamental need for foodstuff makes a sustainable management of the food supply an imperative. Sustainability issues in the food supply chain range from responsible use of limited resources, safe and secure food supply, minimizing food waste, while maintaining economic interests of each player. A novel ap- proach is presented integrating Processing Time, Cost and Operational Risk (PTCORk1) in one quantitative model. It allows for designing Pareto optimal monitoring systems. In a com- parative study, exact and (meta) heuristic methods are compared for best performance. The study with real-world data from an international food company is based on a common and widely consumed foodstuff with typical sustainable food supply chain challenges. Results are thus generalizable to other value chains in the food industry. It provides novel understanding of the seeming contradiction between Processing Time & Cost (PTC) and Operational Risk (ORk). On the system level, the efficient frontier reveals a quantified non-linear relationship. Within the monitoring system the relative contribution of each monitoring activity to the objective function shows a saturation effect enabling practicioners to identify critical monitor- ing activities and engage in step-by-step optimization. Evidence is presented that favorable solutions reveal potential for equidistribution of operational risks and time- and cost-efficient risk allocation. The advantages of a multi-objective approach are compared to either single objective approach. Away from conflicting formulations of minimal operational risk, process- ing time and cost, the approach fosters a more differentiated and quantifiable understanding of the relationship of processing time, cost and operational risk enabeling decision makes to formulate advantageous trade-offs. Optimized scenarios are tested for robustness and potential multiplicatory effects by numerical simulation of a connected dynamic supply chain environment. The approach provides valuable insights for practitioners and enables specific actions for a sustainable and competitive food supply.

EPFL2017

Sustainable Food Supply

Simone Lydia Voldrich

EPFL2017