Abstract
For sustainable supply chains, specific concepts regarding how to efficiently improve sustainability are needed in a global comprehensive triple bottom line (TBL) approach, especially for forwarders as central actors in supply chain design. Such specific advice is provided by reporting empirical DEA Malmquist index findings from seven large European forwarders regarding a TBL sustainability analysis from 2006 to 2016. A major obstacle in improving sustainability consists in the newly discovered fact that with the business cycle, the three TBL areas of economic, ecologic and social objectives for logistics are undergoing different up- and down-ward trends, making it very hard to improve all three simultaneously. Additional factors are identified in the characteristics of size and government influence regarding the sustainability efficiency of forwarders. This has important impacts on supply chain design like e.g., with selection criteria.
Highlights
The objective of this paper is to search for explanatory factors towards sustainability efficiency with logistics service providers (LSP) as central supply chain actors in order to derive management design principles for sustainable supply chains in the future by changing such factors
The transportation, logistics and supply chain management sector is very important for global sustainability as for example 2015 it accounted for 23% of greenhouse gas emissions within the European Union—up from 15% in 1990 [1]
Further research inquiries as well as political and legal discussions are warranted from the results presented here for the LSP DB (Schenker) and SNCF from Germany and France
Summary
The objective of this paper is to search for explanatory factors towards sustainability efficiency with logistics service providers (LSP) as central supply chain actors in order to derive management design principles for sustainable supply chains in the future by changing such factors . The transportation, logistics and supply chain management sector is very important for global sustainability as for example 2015 it accounted for 23% of greenhouse gas emissions within the European Union—up from 15% in 1990 [1] This is connected to the question if logistics service providers (LSP) and forwarders as “designers” of supply chains are part of the solution or part of the problem. The global main transport modes road, rail, air and sea are challenged with sustainability concerns [17,18,19,20]
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