Transparency for Multi-Tier Sustainable Supply Chain Management: A Case Study of a Multi-tier Transparency Approach for SSCM in the Automotive Industry

Iain J Fraser,Martin Müller,Julia Schwarzkopf

doi:10.3390/su12051814

Abstract

Sustainability in supply chain management (SSCM) has become established in both academia and increasingly in practice. As stakeholders continue to require focal companies (FCs) to take more responsibility for their entire supply chains (SCs), this has led to the development of multi-tier SSCM (MT-SSCM). Much extant research has focused on simple supply chains from certain industries. Recently, a comprehensive traceability for sustainability (TfS) framework has been proposed, which outlines how companies could achieve MT-SSCM through traceability. Our research builds on this and responds to calls for cases from the automotive industry by abductively analysing a multi-tier supply chain (MT-SC) transparency case study. This research analyses a raw material SC that is particularly renowned for sustainability problems—the cobalt supply chain for electric vehicles—and finds that the extant literature has oversimplified the operationalisation of transparency in MT-SSCM. We compare the supply chain maps of the MT-SC before and after an auditing and mapping project to demonstrate the transparency achieved. Our findings identify challenges to the operationalisation of SC transparency and we outline how FCs might set to increase MT-SC transparency for sustainability.

Highlights

The last decade has seen remarkable growth in the interest in sustainable supply chain management (SSCM)
This corresponds to the earlier problem of SSCM research that focused on dyadic supplier–buyer relationships [19,22], whereby focal companies (FCs) influence on sub-supply chain sustainability performance decreases with rising supply chains (SCs) distance [22,28,29,82]
Progress in achieving SC Transparency for Sustainability must be made so that, just as eventually SSCM should become the norm in SCM [10], multi-tier SSCM (MT-SSCM) should become the norm in SSCM

Summary

Introduction

The last decade has seen remarkable growth in the interest in sustainable supply chain management (SSCM). One major barrier confronting FCs wanting to improve the sustainability of their SCs is the lack of SC visibility [31], limiting their ability to influence and improve sustainability in their sub-supply chains [15,29,73] This corresponds to the earlier problem of SSCM research that focused on dyadic supplier–buyer relationships [19,22], whereby FC influence on sub-supply chain sustainability performance decreases with rising SC distance [22,28,29,82]. Sauer and Seuring [28] argue that suppliers’ and sub-suppliers’ actions and practices are more likely to be adapted to their SC setting, rather than an FC’s sustainability requirements, given the decreasing FC influence upstream in the SC

Objectives

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion