Supply chain management in a sustainable environment

The focus on environmental management and operations has now moved from local optimization of environmental factors to consideration of the entire supply chain during the production, consumption, customer service and post-disposal disposition of products. This is a critical and timely topic that captures increasing concerns over sustainability, whether driven by current legislation, public interest, or competitive opportunity. Readers of Journal of Operations Management (JOM) are very well aware of the long history and practice of JOM to encourage researchers to explore new topics and frontiers in the field. First, we would like to thank Robert Handfield, the former editor of JOM, to have given us this opportunity to invite manuscripts for this special issue of JOM on sustainability in supply chains in late 2004. His advice and support helped sharpen the direction of this special issue and contributed to its high quality. We would also like to thank the current editors, Ken Boyer and Morgan Swink, for making the editor transition seamless and their guidance in the planning of this special issue as we made progress towards its completion. Given the significance of this problem, this special issue sought to publish papers that address the cutting-edge for integrating environmental management with on-going supply chain management efforts in a sustainable environment. The call for papers encouraged researchers to submit manuscripts across a wide range of topics including recovering value from product returns; managing value and flow of information in closed-loop supply chains; identifying key drivers for integration of environmental and supply chain management; building cost benefit models that could be used as a tool to assess the economics of designing products for recyclability and reuse; and other topics as appropriate to the theme of the special issue. The call for papers also encouraged researchers to apply a wide range of rigorous research methodologies (conceptual, empirical, analytical and case-based research methods) as well as papers that were interdisciplinary. We are very pleased to report that the call for papers for the special issue was an outstanding success and received 50 manuscripts for consideration for publication from many different countries around the globe. Those submissions that were aligned with the objectives and goals of the special issue were sent out to two to three anonymous referees using a double blind process. We took efforts to assign reviewers who were knowledgeable about the background of the manuscript as well as the theory and methodology being applied. The strong rigor and quality of the review process was enabled to a great degree by the excellent pool of reviewers who were willing to contribute to the review process. After the completion of the review process, the final acceptance, rejection, or revise and resubmit decision was made by the guest editors. None of this would have been possible but for the encouragement given to us by Robert Handfield and the referees (please see Appendix A for a complete list of referees) who volunteered significant time and effort to provide valuable feedback to the authors in a relatively short time allotted for reviewing the manuscripts. If the decision was to revise and resubmit, the referees had to allocate sufficient amount of time to again review a revised version of the manuscript to determine whether the authors had made substantial changes to the manuscript based on the comments and feedback provided by these referees. Five articles successfully passed through the review process and a sixth article was accepted as a technical note. An additional review article that was developed by the special issue editors also went through the review process. In summary, the six articles and technical note that successfully went through the review process represented a 14% acceptance rate. The final set published in this special issue are characteristic of the breadth of topics covered by the original 50 and provide a rich and broad ground for future work that lies at the interface of supply chains and sustainability. Having considered the offered acknowledgement and outlined the review process, the papers in the issue are now introduced: Sustainable Supply Chains: An Introduction considers the systemic issues that exist at the intersection of sustainability, environmental management and supply chains. It provides an overview of sustainability and sustainability's increasing importance in policy and decision making. The paper then raises several new, interesting and important questions in this sustainable supply chain environment and points to the interdisciplinary nature of current research in this area. Issues such as product design, by-products management, product life extension and different recovery processes at a product's end-of-life are all considered as critical issues that need to be integrated in a sustainable supply chain environment. Integrating Sustainable Development in the Supply Chain: The Case of Life Cycle Assessment in Oil & Gas and Agricultural Biotechnology draws on the literature from complexity theory, risk management, stakeholder theory and innovation dynamics to discuss various problems of integrating sustainable development concerns in the supply chain. Sustainability stretches the concept of supply chain management to look at optimizing operations from a broader perspective—the entire production system and post-production stewardship as opposed to just the production of a specific product. In this paper, the authors question the notion of optimization as they explore how the complexity associated with defining, coordinating and interacting with stakeholders increases substantially. They document two case studies on agricultural biotechnology and oil and gas companies with supporting data collected from key stakeholders to contrast between a life cycle assessment for environmental management and sustainable development. The authors then provide an analytical framework that addresses the appropriateness of life cycle assessment in the evaluation of complex and novel technologies for sustainable development. Exploring retailers’ sensitivity to local sustainability policies studies the impact of governmental time-window pressure on retailers’ logistical concepts and the consequential financial and environmental distribution performance. The authors consider the interaction between economic with social and environmental issues to determine which dimensions in the retailer's logistical domain determine its cost and emission sensitivity vis-à-vis its time window pressure (the objective of time-windows is to improve the shopping climate in shopping areas by reducing the perceived impacts caused by large vehicles, such as noise, congestion and toxic emissions to separate the freight carriers from the shopping public who use cars to visit the shopping areas). The authors obtained organizational, flow and cost data from 14 retail stores to develop several insights for managers into the organization of urban area store distribution in order to cope with increasingly constrained time-windows and negative effects due to vehicle transportation. Competitive Strategy and the Impact of Take-Back Laws examines the impact of take-back laws and introduces the idea of competition within a manufacturer and remanufacturer framework. The authors consider two implementations of the take-back laws: (1) the manufacturer has no control over returns sold to the remanufacturer, and (2) the manufacturer has complete control. The models are used to predict industry behavior and resulting performance measures over alternative implementations of the take-back laws. The authors introduce a two period model wherein the manufacturer launches a new product in the first period. The remanufacturer acquires returns at the end of the first period and competes with the manufacturer for sales in the second period. An extensive numerical study is conducted to investigate how alternative implementations of the take-back law impact measures of interest to the manufacturer, the remanufacturer and the governmental policy-maker. Linking Forward and Reverse Supply Chain Investments: The Role of Business Uncertainty requires that companies not only address new issues in the area of sustainable management such as reverse logistics supply chains, but to also change existing practices to create innovative production and operations management systems. The authors examine the investment in reverse supply chains as it relates to the forward supply chains and the perception of managers on risk propensity and business uncertainty. A survey instrument was administered across four industries in Canada that were selected because of their high probability in investing in reverse supply chains as well as their variability in business uncertainty and supply chain investments. The authors conducted factor analysis and structural equation modeling to validate their hypothesis testing. The results suggest that managers’ perceptions of the organization's willingness to accept or seek risk were an important determinant of the investment patterns. An Analysis of Decentralized Collection and Processing Operations for End-of-Life Products consider a durable end of life product from which parts can be dismantled and remanufactured while the remainder of the product can be processed further for material recovery. Motivated with their work in the automotive industry, the authors develop models to determine the optimal acquisition price for end-of-life products as well as the selling price for remanufactured products. Two decentralized channels where the Original equipment manufacturer (OEM) outsources the collection operation and the remanufacturer driven channel in which the OEM outsources the processing operation are considered in this paper. Through extensive numerical investigation, the authors provide conditions in which the OEM would prefer to outsource the collection activity as well as situations in which the OEM would prefer to outsource the processing activity. Several insights are generated to help managers understand how the pricing behavior of the collector and the remanufacture might impact the collection rates of used products. The technical note Remaining Life Estimation of Used Components in Consumer Products: Life Cycle Data Analysis by Weibull and Artificial Neural Networks uses reliability assessment by life cycle data analysis to analyze the behavior of components for reuse. The authors adopt the weibull analysis to assess the mean life of components in the first phase and develop an artificial neural network procedure to analyze the degradation and condition of used products in the second phase of this project. The results are validated by utilizing life cycle data from a washing machine. This integrated approach proposed in the paper should help managers develop strategic and operational decisions during the design, usage and disposal stages of the product's life cycle. The papers included in this special issue show the breadth of scholarly operations management research that is being conducted in the sustainable supply chain area. It has been our privilege to be involved in this project and we would like to take this opportunity to thank all the contributors and reviewers who were kind enough to provide us with several rounds of comments and feedback. It is evident that the research challenges are significant and have captured the interest of operations management scholars and practitioners around the globe. Many thanks to the diligent work and fast response of our reviewers