Guest editorial

Citation

Pati, N. (2016), "Guest editorial", Benchmarking: An International Journal, Vol. 23 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/BIJ-04-2016-0052

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Benchmarking: An International Journal, Volume 23, Issue 6.

It is my distinct privilege to present to you this special issue dedicated to “Benchmarking integration of ‘sustainability’ principles into supply chain management processes and practices.” The special issue was motivated by the unyielding speed of business activities organized into supply chains to take advantages of rapid globalization. These supply chains have led to enhanced shareholder values by the way of streamlining their business processes with the objectives of reducing response times, eliminating non-value added activities, reducing costs, improving flexibility, improving customer satisfaction, increasing profits, and deriving a host of other ripple effects. While we have seen the benefits to organizations shore up due to supply chains, we have seen deterioration in managing supply chains to conserve our environment, protect vulnerable sections of our societies, create even playing fields for organizations to compete across countries, value dignity of labor, create opportunities for our next generation to flourish in the way we did, and overall, to make our planet “sustainable.”

There are a lot of opportunities for our businesses to learn from each other as to how they use their supply chains to foster “sustainability” in their business processes. As thought leaders, our academic researchers should analyze, assimilate, and synthesize such “best practices” to the benefit of fellow researchers and contemporary businesses.

The special issue begins with the article by Fereira, Silva, and Azevedo and presents a model – Env_BSC_4_SCPM – that has integrated the balanced score card (BSC) framework, the global reporting initiative rubrics, and ISO 14031 methodologies. Since the formalization of the BSC concept by Kaplan and Norton (1992), BSC has been in use primarily in performance improvement and strategic planning. Recently, the popularity of this pragmatic concept has touched various green issues in both for-profit and non-profit organizations. The article demonstrates the application of five phases of the model out of which the last phase reckons Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle (Deming, 1986) in order to facilitate continuous improvement.

Ahmad, de Brito, and Tavasszy’s article appears next with its focus on sustainability reporting in the supply chain related to the oil and gas industry. The article performs content analysis of 30 oil and gas company reports published by Roberts Environmental Center on 84 indicators that measure sustainability intent and reporting. The research is an improvement on the research published by Lee et al. (2011) on social performance of a firm with respect to accounting-based and market-based performance as well as sustainable growth rate in crude oil production and petroleum refining industries. Some of the important findings of the article are based upon the inconsistency in sustainability reporting. While companies are candid about their commitment toward sustainability, their practices do not concur with their actual sustainability performance. Further, sustainability reporting is primarily descriptive which compromises the objectivity of the reporting process.

In the next paper, Govindaraju et al., presents their study of 156 Malaysian electronic firms to establish how supply chain integration mediates the relationship between supply chain management practices and supply chain performance. The theoretical constructs of the paper take the resource-based view of the firm (Barney, 1991) to develop nine main hypotheses. Subsequently, the hypotheses were tested using the approach developed by Baron and Kenny (1986) and Sobel (1982), and the bootstrapping resampling procedure. The research found that all the seven supply chain management practice dimensions are significantly and positively associated with supply chain integration as the mediating variable and supply chain performance as the dependent variable.

The next article by Azevedo, Carvalho, and Cruz-Machado addresses an integrated approach to capture the leanness, agility, resilience, and greenness (LARG) index of an automotive supply chain. The article extends the work of Azevedo et al. (2012a, b) where they assumed the paradigms (LARG) to be of equal importance. In the proposed model, the researchers have constructed a benchmarking tool that allows for dissimilar level of importance ratings based upon the responses obtained from a panel of academics and professionals that possessed expertise in developing and/or managing automotive supply chain. They ascertained the weights by using three rounds of the Delphi questionnaires using the additive weighting method.

Our institutions of higher education (IHEs) have been at the leading edge of teaching, conducting research, and engaging their communities in sustainability related issues. Talloires Declaration proclaimed by 22 IHE presidents under the aegis of the university leaders for a sustainable future was the harbinger of the progresses made in academy to make our planet sustainable (Adlong, 2013). The next paper of this special issue by Pati and Lee addresses an important area on benchmarking the value chain in the academy on sustainability dimension to recruit the best President (agent) by our IHE Trustees (principals). The article presents eight hypotheses to investigate the relationship between college presidents’ compensation and variables such as environmental sustainability, social sustainability, cost efficiency as a measure of economic sustainability, tenure, institutional control of the university such as public or private, fundraising, reputation, endowment, and professor’s salary. Although our IHEs are considered the citadel of sustainability, the findings of the paper suggest that the presidents at such organizations are not compensated based upon their involvement in making their institutions sustainable. Thus, our IHEs have significant needs for changing the compensation formula to attract presidents that are passionate about implementing sustainability on their campuses.

It is interesting to observe a surge of interest in fuzzy technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal situation (TOPSIS), interpretive structural modeling (ISM)) fuzzy, matrix of cross-impact multiplications applied to classifications (MICMAC), and fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (FAHP) analyses to evaluate the sustainability aspects of supply chains. The following three articles present a few innovative models to demonstrate the application and utility of the above techniques to develop, implement, and evaluate sustainable supply chains.

The article by Metaxas, Koulouriotis, and Spartalis highlights how our current body of literature discusses primarily the issue of sustainability of suppliers and manufacturers but not the sustainability of the organization as a whole. The article, thus, proposes a sustainable business excellence index (SBEI) to address the gap. The study has established the SBEI of an organization with fuzzy sets and provides an integrated methodology for benchmarking the sustainability of organizations. While FAHP (Bozbura and Beskese, 2007) has been used to ascertain the weights in this multi-criteria decision making, TOPSIS (Hwang and Yoon, 1981) has determined the rankings of the alternatives. The article uses both intangible and tangible criteria and shows the applicability of the approach by demonstrating a simulated case.

The next article by Dube and Gawande closely follows the modeling approach of the previous paper, but has its distinctive touch in terms of developing a hierarchy-based model in line with ISM with the objective to design a sustainable supply chain (Warfield, 1974; Sage, 1977). The article uses the scheme of boundaries leading to green supply chain management (GSCM). After identifying 14 barriers to GSCM implementation, the authors develop an integrated ISM and fuzzy MICMAC approach (Duperrin and Godet, 1973; Watson, 1978) with the objective to ascertain the indirect and direct effects of each barrier to implementing GSCM.

The next paper by Datta, Sahu, and Mahapatra studies the feasibility of fuzzy-based multi-level multi-criteria decision making module and compares it with fuzzy TOPSIS (Saghaan and Hejazi, 2005), in the decision to appraise and select green suppliers in a GSCM environment. Implementation of fuzzy set theory circumvents the ambiguity associated with subjective human judgment. The above module, thus, is capable of working under multi-level integrated criteria hierarchy of green supplier performance appraisement index system. Further, the article suggests that the above system can be used to select the best supplier that meets a host of sustainability criteria. Alternatively, the tool can be used to identify the supplier that needs improvement or to weed out the supplier that might be the weakest link in the supply chain in terms of implementing sustainability objectives.

Finally, Sobreiro et al. present a framework that integrates sustainable operations management with GSCM. The paper melds the work of Hart and Milstein (2003) and Kleindorfer et al. (2005) to propose a framework comprising four quadrants. The first quadrant represents the organizations that are at the initial stage of GSCM with focus on internal operations. The second quadrant represents organizations that are at the initial stages of external practices, e.g., green purchasing, etc. In the third quadrant, internal GSCM Practice such as eco-design, and OM principles such as integrated quality, environmental, and manufacturing systems occupy the centerpiece. The fourth and the last quadrant represents the organizations that are most evolved in adopting GSCM practices to build synergies with operations management. The article, overall, shows connections between GSCM and operations management techniques such as lean manufacturing, JIT, TQM, Six Sigma, and TOC.

I sincerely hope that you will enjoy reading all the articles published in this special issue. I sincerely appreciate the ad hoc reviewers that took special care to review the articles in a timely fashion. Last but not least, I appreciate Dr A. Gunasekaran and BIJ’s staff for their support and help throughout the review and production cycle of the issue.

Niranjan Pati

Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, Rowan University, Glassboro, New Jersey, USA

References

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Azevedo, S.G., Govindan, K., Carvalho, H. and Cruz-Machado, V. (2012b), “Ecosilient index to assess the greenness and resilience of the upstream automotive supply chain”, Journal of Cleaner Production, Vol. 56 No. 1, pp. 131-146

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Bozbura, F.T. and Beskese, A. (2007), “Prioritization of organizational capital measurement indicators using fuzzy AHP”, International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, Vol. 44 No. 2, pp. 124-147

Deming, W.E. (1986), Out of the Crisis, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Duperrin, J.C. and Godet, M. (1973), “Methode De Hierar Chization Des Elements D’um System”, Rapport Economique De CEA, Paris, pp. 45-51

Hart, S.L. and Milstein, M.B. (2003), “Creating sustainable value”, The Academy of Management Executive, Vol. 17 No. 2, pp. 56-67

Hwang, C.L. and Yoon, K. (1981), Multiple Attribute Decision Making and Applications, Springer-Verlag, Berlin

Kaplan, R.S. and Norton, D.P. (1992), “The balanced scorecard: measures that drive performance”, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 70 No. 1, pp. 71-79

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Lee, J., Pati, N. and Roh, J.J. (2011), “Relationship between corporate sustainability performance and tangible business performance: evidence from oil and gas industry”, International Journal of Business Insights and Transformation, Vol. 3 No. 3, pp. 72-82

Sage, A.P. (1977), Interpretive Structural Modeling: Methodology for Large Scale Systems, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY

Saghaan, S. and Hejazi, S. (2005), “Multi-criteria group decision making using a modied fuzzy TOPSIS procedure”, Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Intelligence for Modelling, Control, and Automation, CIMCA 2005 and International Conference on Intelligent Agents, Web Technologies, and Internet Commerce, Vol. 2 No. 1, IAWTIC 2005, Vienna, pp. 215-221

Sobel, M.E. (1982), “Asymptotic confidence intervals for indirect effects in structural equation models”, in Leinhart, S. (Ed.), Sociological Methodology, Josey-Bass, San Francisco, CA, pp. 290-312

Warfield, J.W. (1974), “Developing interconnected matrices in structural modelling”, IEEE Transactions on Systems Men and Cybernetics, Vol. 4 No. 1, pp. 51-81

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Further reading

Bilbao, A.M., Carrano, A.L., Hewitt, M. and Thorn, B.K. (2011), “On the environmental impacts of pallet management operations”, Management Research Review, Vol. 34 No. 11, pp. 1222-1236

Gabrielli, J.S.A. (2009), “The greening of Petrobras”, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 87 No. 3, pp. 43-47

Hamel, G. and Prahalad, C. (1991), “Corporate imagination and expeditionary marketing”, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 69 No. 4, pp. 81-92