Opportunities of Combining Sustainable Supply Chain Management Practices for Performance Improvement

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Considerable efforts for research on sustainable supply chain management have become evident in the past years. Besides conceptual studies and quantitative models, empirical research on corporate practices has been contributing to promote reductions of impacts on the environment and society. The systematic combination of practices is, however, not yet approached in literature. Therefore, this chapter presents results derived from a systematic literature review based on a recently developed framework for managing sustainable supply chain practices. Through contingency analysis on the selected publications, correlations between the framework dimensions and categories enable the identification of dominating and underrepresented initiatives. Lastly, corporate reports published by five German automotive manufacturers are examined. Results show that both sustainable procurement and waste management practices are strongly correlated with a firm’s production management practices. Moreover, general issues of waste management are most often discussed in concert with distributional and customer relationship practices. In contrast, corporate governance and supplier relationship practices are implemented isolated from other initiatives. The apparent lack of integration between these practices motivated a second round of analysis, which considers 21 more specific categories. The findings are further compared to sustainability leaders’ examples to offer managerial insights and opportunities to enhance sustainable supply chain performance. This chapter focuses specifically on sustainable supply chain practices and introduces the concept of “initiative combination rent,” contributing nonetheless to further the understanding of how companies can improve supply chain and sustainability performance.