Design of Environmental Performance Monitoring Systems in the Supply Chain: The Role of Interoperability

Abstract

In response to the mounting request for sustainable supply chains, companies need to assess the environmental performance of their operations and products. Recent studies within the field of Information Systems (IS) argue that information systems can forge supply chain sustainability by monitoring a firm's environmental performance. The latter requires a specific type of Information Systems, namely environmental performance monitoring systems, hence our study focuses on such systems and addresses the challenge of designing them. That is, through a design science approach, we capture the industrial and informational requirements of environmental performance monitoring in the supply chain context and derive a conceptual architectural framework that is generic in the sense of including all the basic components that comprise such systems. To establish the applicability of our architectural framework, we instantiate it for two cases of environmental performance monitoring systems that are then deployed under different settings. We conclude by proposing a set of design propositions and discuss their validity and importance in relation to a firm's level of interoperability.