Division of Information Technology, Engineering and the Environment
School of Advanced Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering
School of Advanced Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering
Thesis Abstract
Sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) has attracted the interest of more and more academics and large organizations as well as some small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Researchers are trying to deploy the concept of sustainability into the analysis of supply chain management (SCM) and three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social and environmental perspectives or profit, people and planet have been often considered in the assessment of the sustainability.
However, how to measure the sustainability of SCM is still of great difficulty due to lack of formulas or standardizations to evaluate it. Although there are various indexes for assessing different levels of sustainability including national economics, industrial sectors, companies and specific products or services, only one indicator known as Overall Business Impact Assessment (OBIA) which originally for businesses and groups of customer products has been extended for assessing the economic and environmental performance of the supply chain. So far the author has not identified any researches on the sustainability performance index (SPI) of SCM to reflect all the three dimensions of sustainability. As a lot of the quality, safety and wastage issues occurred in the food supply chain, more and more attention has been attracted by the food sustainability. The development of the SPI framework may provide a good guidance for the assessment of the supply chain in food industry in terms of the economic, social and environmental impacts.
Therefore, this research is going to carry out a case study of a food manufacturing company and develop a framework of SPI including various metrics by using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) with the aims to reflect the three dimensions of sustainability of the supply chain in food industry. Furthermore, the author explores the possibilities to use goal programming with the data collected from the case study to optimize the SPI by considering the three perspectives of sustainability. The main purpose of this research is to provide a guide to the organizations for the assessment and optimization of the sustainability of the supply chain in food industry, which may also benefit the future researchers in the field of SSCM. The innovative approach to optimize the SPI and balanced view of sustainability performance for food supply chain may be able to minimize the negative environmental and social impact but maximizing the profits. By applying such approach, those organizations could create more competitive advantages by enjoying higher reputation and better confidence from the consumers, and therefore, achieve sustainable development.
