Operational excellence for improving sustainable supply chain performance

Abstract

Planning and synchronizing operations are fundamentally essential to ensure sustainability in Supply Chains (SCs) (Bag et al., 2020). Traditionally operations management is primarily focused on efficiency, effectiveness, and economy of SCs. However, growing pressures from governments and SC stakeholders are forcing organizations to recalibrate their operations strategies to include environmental and social sustainability perspectives. There is greater impetus since proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 by the United Nations (United Nations Development Programme, 2015). Research in operations management has also started embracing sustainability from an operational excellence perspective in SCs (Mani and Gunasekaran, 2018; Sehnem et al., 2019). The Sustainable Supply Chain (SSC) is a concept that concurrently integrates ecological, economic, and societal measures of operations in an SC. The Triple Bottom Line (TBL) concept clubs all these three metrics of sustainability. Organizations need to evaluate not just their own operations, but also operations across the supply chains, considering all the three metrics of sustainability. A localized and short term approach to sustainability is not appropriate (Jabbour et al., 2019). The operational performance of the SCs needs to be evaluated based on their trade-offs with TBL model of sustainability. Sustainability in operations is a significant emerging challenge for organizations (Bhandari et al., 2019; Ghadimi et al., 2019). SC operations such as quality management, lean manufacturing, six sigma, Information Technology (IT) implementation, material sourcing, inventory management, and reversed logistics operations are frequently studied in SSCs (Li, 2013; Gaustad et al., 2018; Farias et al., 2019). Most existing works on SSCs discuss strategies such as corporate social responsibility, green sourcing and supplier selection (Luthra et al., 2017), the various R's of sustainability- reduce, recycle, reuse, remanufacture, redesign (Scur and Barbosa, 2017). However, in recent years, a number of operational excellence based paradigms have been integrated in the SSC literature, such as big data (Bag et al., 2020), blockchain, Circular Economy (CE) (Gaustad et al., 2018), Inter-organizational Information Technologies, Internet of Things (Zhao et al., 2019), Industry 4.0, Theory of Constraints (Koh et al., 2017), Business Process Reengineering (Kumar and Rahman, 2014), etc. These research paradigms explores different dimensions of SSCs and contribute further by providing decisions support such as routing decisions, production scheduling, integration mechanisms in SSCs, risk mitigation, sustainable performance indicators, lean strategies, policy enablers, and barriers, thus, enhancing performance and excellence across SSC operations (Jabbour et al., 2019). There is a great focus given towards the impact assessment and management of SC operations, using impact assessment techniques such as Life cycle assessment, environmental management system, and carbon footprint assessment (Farias et al., 2019). There is also a growing literature that contributes towards sustainable performance measurement in SCs, especially using the TBL concept. Research in these dimensions of operations management can help managers implement sustainable operational strategies and better understand the trade-offs by applying a holistic sustainable business perspective. The theoretical contributions from these researches help managers adopt innovative approaches towards sustainability in SC operations. Still, research in SSCs has a long way to go. The up-scaling of supply chain sustainability will require managers and practitioners to tackle complexities and potential challenges with holistic and systemic focus. Expounding the role of operational excellence activities is crucial for SC sustainability. The journey towards sustainability in SCs will require managers to tap on operational excellence approaches to influence various sustainability performance dimensions such as SSC flexibility, business competitiveness, coordination and collaboration, dynamic and relational capabilities, SC transparency, technology management and innovation (Mangla et al., 2019). However, there is a growing need to understand how operational excellence can be leveraged to improve and transform SSC structures significantly, to further enhance these SC sustainability performance dimensions. The present Virtual Special Issue (VSI) seeks to contribute in the same direction by encouraging researchers to develop an understanding of how initiatives and strategies for operational excellence will advance sustainability in SCs.