The Drivers, Practices and Outcomes of Green Supply Chain Management

Abstract

The global shift in ecological movement has significant impacts on business operation of manufacturing firms that are located in developing countries. The intense pressure of being environmentally sustainable has caused Green Supply Chain Management (Green SCM) concept to emerge as an important corporate environmental strategy for manufacturing companies. Information technologies and systems have permeated in most business activities, in which, they extend important opportunities to resolve environmental issues. However, many researchers, including manufacturers and government bodies often disregard the green concept of information technologies and systems in minimizing environmental issues. A comprehensive review on Green SCM, Green IT and Green IS for sustainable environmental performance in manufacturing companies is presented using Input-Process-Output (IPO) Theory and Technological-Organizational-Environmental (TOE) theory. In bridging the research gap, a model is constructed to link the aforementioned constructs. Next, the paper reports on the development of survey questionnaire using cognitive interviewing strategies, followed up with semi-structured interview to investigate and obtain preliminary findings on the influential factors, green activities and performance outcomes from implementing Green SCM. Lastly, the finalized survey questionnaire was distributed to 60 ISO14001 certified manufacturing companies located in the region of Perak and Kulim. Out of 60 manufacturing companies, only 32 responses received as the dataset in analyzing for improvements in reliability, measurement error, and validity of measured items. The findings from this pilot study explain that internal and external factors have stronger influence over the implementation of green initiatives in supply chain with substantial outcome on environmental performance. The information technologies and systems being the physical resource, capability and backbone to run a business seamlessly are significantly recognized. But, the green component of IT and IS were poorly attended and disregarded to an extent in the process of greening the processes, operations or entire business. Therefore, further investigations are required in the main study to validate the findings obtained here and other possible association between the factors, practices and outcomes in realizing ecological improvements in the supply chain and firm itself.