Sustainable Operations

Increase in environmental concerns together with legislations are forcing industries to take a fresh look at the impact of their supply chain operations on the environment. This paper introduces a mixed-integer linear programming based framework for sustainable supply chain design that considers life cycle assessment (LCA) principles in addition to the traditional material balance constraints at each node in the supply chain. Indeed, the framework distinguishes between solid and liquid wastes, as well as gaseous emissions due to various production processes and transportation systems. The framework is used to evaluate the tradeoffs between economic and environmental objectives under various cost and operating strategies in the aluminum industry. The results suggest that current legislation and Emission Trading Schemes (ETS) must be strengthened and harmonized at the global level in order to drive a meaningful environmental strategy. Moreover, the model demonstrates that efficient carbon management strategies will help decision makers to achieve sustainability objectives in a cost-effective manner. Please cite this article as: Chaabane, A., et al., Design of sustainable supply chains under the emission trading scheme. Please cite this article as: Chaabane, A., et al., Design of sustainable supply chains under the emission trading scheme. Please cite this article as: Chaabane, A., et al., Design of sustainable supply chains under the emission trading scheme.

Environmentalism is no longer an issue of reluctant compliance with regulatory requirements. In the last decade, it has increasingly emerged as a potential mechanism for gaining competitive advantage and has become and important aspect of strategic management. In this article we identify and describe the basic elements of an environmentally conscious manufacturing strategy. We then describe some tools and techniques that enable businesses to pursue ECM strategies, and discuss some of the major environmental manufacturing initiatives taking place in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Companies interested in greening their supply chains quickly realize that carbon and energy waste represents an expense, and thus minimizing this expense not only brings in truckloads of money, but also helps save the environment. This paper demonstrates that shipment consolidation, a powerful logistics strategy that combines two or more small shipments into an aggregate load to be dispatched on the same vehicle, can help mitigate carbon and energy waste. Specifically, a Discrete-Time Based Shipment ConsoLidation (DTB-SCL) policy and a new method to calculate CO2 emissions associated with the dispatch of a vehicle are introduced. In addition, an optimization model with the objective of maximizing combined economic and environmental savings is developed in this study. It is shown that, among other benefits, the higher use of transportation capacity decreases environmental damage, one goal of the DTB-SCL policy. The mechanics of the mathematical models are illustrated by numerical examples, and sensitivity analyses are conducted to provide managerial insights that might help companies come to better decisions that are environmentally responsible.

The present work analyzes the impact of negative social / environmental events on the market value of supply chain partners. The study offers a contextualized discussion around important concepts which are largely employed on the Operations Management and Management literature in general. Among them, the developments of the literature around supply chains, supply chain management, corporate social responsibility, sustainable development and sustainable supply chain management are particularly addressed, beyond the links they share with competitive advantage. As for the theoretical bases, the study rests on the Stakeholder Theory, on the discussion of the efficient-market hypothesis and on the discussion of the adjustment of stock prices to new information. In face of such literature review negative social / environmental events are then hypothesized as causing negative impact in the market value of supply chain partners. Through the documental analysis of publicly available information around 15 different cases (i.e. 15 events), 82 supply chain partners were identified. Event studies for seven different event windows were conducted on the variation of the stock price of each supply chain partner, valuing the market reaction to the stock price of a firm due to triggering events occurred in another. The results show that, in general, the market value of supply chain partners was not penalized in response to such announcements. In that sense, the hypothesis derived from the literature review is not confirmed. Beyond that, the study also provides a critical description of the 15 cases, identifying the companies that have originated such events and their supply chain partners involved.

In this letter, the computational power of a class of RAM-based neural networks, called General Single-layer Sequential Weightless Neural Networks (GSSWNNs), is analyzed. The theoretical results presented, besides helping the understanding of the temporal behavior of these networks, could also provide useful insights for the developing of new learning algorithms.

Abstract The concepts associated with sustainability have been gradually incorporated into business models in recent years. Particularly in the field of Operations Management (OM), the adoption of new performance indicators and the revision of operations strategy content and process frameworks are changing the way companies manage their operations regarding sustainability, creating the right conditions for new operations management model development. Such models were created in order to assess the impact and to characterize the progress of new initiatives in sustainability in the economic, environmental and social spheres (Triple Bottom Line -TBL). This paper, based on academic literature and professional models, proposes a framework for verifying the level of maturity of sustainable operations. Its distinguishing aspect contemplates the integrated approach over TBL along five proposed maturity levels, followed by descriptions of context, structure, processes, value chain and functional recommendations on implementation. The main objective of the Sustainable Operations Maturity Model (SOMM) is to be applied as a managerial tool to support organizations when evaluating the integration of sustainability into their strategies, and especially to provide guidelines for the evolution of sustainable operation processes.

Organizations are influenced by external demands, which can be represented by changes on the markets they are part of. Companies are operating on a new context, where the importance of sustainability has been highlighted by events like environmental problems, social responsibility issues and quality assurance of products and services. Those aspects are represented by the areas of the Triple Bottom-Line (3BL), which treat organizations operational performance on economic, environmental and social aspects. However, organizations are still trying to develop new performance measurement systems, which relate to the 3BL and that can be used for sustainable performance assessment and benchmarking. In order to address this need, this research will aim to develop a process that enables standards and guidelines to be used as tools for the establishment of a performance measurement system which can address the needs of integrated management on behalf of sustainability aspects. The method used on the development of this article utilizes concepts of the Process Approach methodology from Cambridge University, as well as Business Process Management Notation to represent processes for assessing performance. Those processes were built with a high emphasis on Performance Assessment frameworks and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) theories. The processes generated have been applied in a project of innovation in sustainable management, in which its application enabled to work with requirements from various standards and guidelines in a practical context, through the usage of indicators and performance measurement. Exemplifying the application of this process, the article will aim to clarify the usage of indicators based on standards and guidelines as a tool for sustainability assessment, through an integrated management of an organization set of standards and guidelines.

In the last few decades the competitive context development trajectory is leading companies to increase their contribution for sustainable development. Stakeholders' accountability demands are being reflected in present multidisciplinary regulatory framework that is formed by standards, guidelines and guidance reports, and allows markets and society to have evidences from sustainable behavior, which is certified or formally agreed or signatory by companies. Operations strategy performance information could be addressed to a set of evolutionary performance indicators, which could represent sustainability present performance, and also could orient companies in reaching higher performance levels according to a preset maturity trajectory. The objective of this paper is to develop a process for generating an integrated set of performance measures for managing sustainability at value chain or operations system level. An applied research was conducted based on action research approach, operationalized by Cambridge process or engineering approach, and managed in research process management cycle. Performance measures are formally and detailed defined as metadata. Process application not only allows a better understanding on how sustainability indicators could be integrated and related to a maturity model, but also created an information system that could be used for auditing, assessment and reporting sustainability performance.

ATENCO was perhaps one of the largest European Commission projects on port development and pricing. The main objective of the project was to gauge the extent to which infrastructure development policies and related pricing in one country/port might impact traffic distribution among competing ports, and consequently to assess the desirability of developing a more harmonised approach towards port development across Europe.

The present brief report to the European Commission, uploaded below, summarizes the objectives of the various Work Packages and presents the project’s main conclusions. Amongst them, the project claims that, in spite of the benefits to society of long-run marginal cost pricing, in industries with high fixed costs, capital indivisibilities and increasing returns to scale such as ports, particularly those operating in a competitive environment, marginal cost pricing is not so straightforward, whereas full cost recovery, in combination with the user pays principle, can form a workable basis for fair and efficient pricing.

In addition, the project advocated for the need for accurate and standardised statistics on various port magnitudes and costs; transparency in port accounts and standardisation of accounting systems; definition of the relationship between the port and its ‘institutional supervisor’; and agreement on what is or is not allowed as public support to seaports (state aid). The report showed that if further progress on these issues were to be made, full cost recovery would become more straightforward, while the pricing policies to implement this could be left to the commercial skills of individual ports.