An Entropy-Based Approach for Assessing Operational Visibility in Sustainable Supply Chain

Sustainable supply chains have emerged from a growing need for integrating environmentally sound practices into supply chains. Drivers of sustainability in supply chains include growing consumer pressure for eco-friendly products, increased complexities, globalisation and the need to reduce the negative impact of supply chain operations on the environment, society and economy. An enabler of sustainable supply chain is visibility, i.e. the extent to which actors within a sustainable supply chain have access to, or share, mutually benefiting information that is key or useful to their operations and supports decision making. It is important for sustainable supply chains to know their visibility levels and be able to manage it appropriately. This paper presents an approach to measuring visibility in sustainable supply chains based on Shannon’s information entropy. Entropy is demonstrated to be a powerful tool for visibility assessment in sustainable supply chain. The approach is illustrated with an example and areas of future work is highlighted.