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Introduction: This study investigates the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on the sustainability of the supply chain. It investigates how modern supply networks and procedures were equipped for such a catastrophe, and the pandemic’s effects on the environment, highlighting the significance of studying resilience and sustainability concurrently.

Purpose: The study acknowledges the importance of environmental sustainability for businesses and the need to examine trends in organisational, customer, policy, and distribution networks.

Need for the Study: The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted supply chains. This study aims to provide insight into the long-term repercussions of the crisis and the importance of incorporating environmental considerations.

Methodology: The study uses a mixed-methods approach to evaluate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on supply networks and environmental sustainability indices. Data from industry reports, governmental publications, polls, and qualitative research techniques have been gathered.

Findings: The results of this study advance our understanding of how to preserve supply chains in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights the need for enhanced resilience and sustainability measures, expose the flaws and weaknesses of contemporary supply networks, and uncover developing patterns and tactics in customer behaviour, policy frameworks, distribution networks, and supply chain management.

Practical Implications: The COVID-19 pandemic has provided businesses, decision makers, and researchers with guidance on handling its potential and challenges – increasing the supply chain’s resistance to future interruptions, incorporating environmentally friendly practises, developing policies to support resilient and sustainable supply chains, adapting to changing consumer tastes, increasing effectiveness, and minimising the environmental impact of distribution networks.

Purpose: Technological innovations and frameworks that provide a framework for unification have evolved to improve information exchange across organisational units and information security. These integration technologies share and communicate information using defined protocols and different data. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) is a significant emerging approach that enables modular design solution construction.

Methodology: These designs are beneficial when many apps operating on different architectures and networks need to connect. A well-defined strategy and company-specific guidelines are essential for ensuring the firm’s systematic adoption of such an architecture. The critical components of MASSOASCM ‘(Multi-Agent System Service Oriented Architecture Supply Chain Management’ are a multi-agent system (MAS), a service-oriented structure, and supplier management. The MASSOASCM model has been made, and a production unit has been made to show how it works.

Findings: It has been stated that it saves development costs, and inventory management, all of which are critical concerns in any company. Our goal is to create an inventory control approach that relies on MAS and SOA but also a simulation that demonstrates how it works and may enhance Supply Chain Management (SCM) productivity in a production plant.

Practical Implications: The SCM implementation comprises three different services: SCM, SOA, and MAS. These facilities are constructed, maintained, planned, and implemented individually before being brought together collectively using MAS and SOA techniques.

This paper explores sustainability within supply chain management and its link towards resilience through the lens of ethics. The wicked problem of sustainability impacts supply chains and society at large, and the ability of supply chains to remain viable in the future is based on the sustainability of business practices. The paper argues that a substantive proportion of sustainability mechanisms (such as the Triple Bottom Line approach and codes of conducts) can be viewed within the ethical paradigm of deontology, whereby the morality of an action is based on adherence to rules. However, there are numerous critiques of such approaches and their success in creating more sustainable practices. Therefore, the paper proposes there is a need for systems thinking approaches to be incorporated into the exploration of the link between ethics, sustainability and supply chain resilience. Using two examples of social sustainability issues in Australia – modern slavery legislation and horticultural ¹ worker exploitation – the paper demonstrates the utility of various systems thinking methodologies to explore the complexity of these issues. The paper sets out a conceptual call to arms for researchers and practitioners to apply a holistic lens towards how the morality of actions is shaped and influences supply chain sustainability practices.

Purpose: A sophisticated network of interconnected supply chains serves as the central organising principle for most of the manufacturing serving the global economy. Right from computers and vehicles to life-saving pharmaceuticals and food is made possible by the supply web. The final goods part of a supply chain may include thousands of components from various global regions. These supply chains have been refined to achieve the highest speed and efficiency.

Methodology: This study includes a sample of 127 firms that have been in business for at least 15 years and are familiar with business dynamics. The authors anticipate how climate risks, common in global supply networks, will evolve over the next several decades. This study examines the vulnerability of nine commercial value chains to climatic disasters. Also, it explores company and value chain vulnerabilities, financial losses, and adaptation or strategic methods to increase resilience.

Findings: Companies must plan forward in terms of locations by retaining operational facilities while running new operations in less risky places. Without change, supply networks will become unstable and dangerous shortly. Using their climate objectives, businesses must decarbonise their supply chains. Businesses should connect with suppliers longer-term. The quality and dependability of a company’s suppliers affect its success and safety. Future-focussed corporations are already engaging their suppliers on health, safety, and environmental issues.

Significance: The typology may be helpful to executives as they make decisions about the strategic option(s) they wish to pick to address climate change. These decisions can also be influenced by the insights provided by the research about the present status of operations of other firms from different sectors all over the globe.

Contemporary literature reveals that, to date, the poultry livestock sector has not received sufficient research attention. This particular industry suffers from unstructured supply chain practices, lack of awareness of the implications of the sustainability concept and failure to recycle poultry wastes. The current research thus attempts to develop an integrated supply chain model in the context of poultry industry in Bangladesh. The study considers both sustainability and supply chain issues in order to incorporate them in the poultry supply chain. By placing the forward and reverse supply chains in a single framework, existing problems can be resolved to gain economic, social and environmental benefits, which will be more sustainable than the present practices.

The theoretical underpinning of this research is ‘sustainability’ and the ‘supply chain processes’ in order to examine possible improvements in the poultry production process along with waste management. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and ‘design science’ methods with the support of system dynamics (SD) and the case study methods. Initially, a mental model is developed followed by the causal loop diagram based on in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and observation techniques. The causal model helps to understand the linkages between the associated variables for each issue. Finally, the causal loop diagram is transformed into a stock and flow (quantitative) model, which is a prerequisite for SD-based simulation modelling. A decision support system (DSS) is then developed to analyse the complex decision-making process along the supply chains.

The findings reveal that integration of the supply chain can bring economic, social and environmental sustainability along with a structured production process. It is also observed that the poultry industry can apply the model outcomes in the real-life practices with minor adjustments. This present research has both theoretical and practical implications. The proposed model’s unique characteristics in mitigating the existing problems are supported by the sustainability and supply chain theories. As for practical implications, the poultry industry in Bangladesh can follow the proposed supply chain structure (as par the research model) and test various policies via simulation prior to its application. Positive outcomes of the simulation study may provide enough confidence to implement the desired changes within the industry and their supply chain networks.

Considering sustainability and resilience together is crucial in food supply chain (FSC) management, as it ensures a balanced approach that meets environmental, economic and social needs while maintaining the system's capacity to withstand disruptions. Towards this, a multi-objective optimisation model is proposed in this study to create an integrated sustainable and resilient FSC. The proposed model employs four objective functions – each representing a dimension of sustainability and one for resilience and utilises an augmented ϵ-constraint method for solving. The findings highlight the interplay between sustainability aspects and resilience, illustrating that overemphasis on any single dimension can adversely affect others. Further, the proposed model is applied to the case of Indian mango pulp supply chain and several inferences are derived. The proposed model would assist decision-makers in making a well-balanced choice based on sustainability and resilience considerations.

Previous work has shown that corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives can preserve shareholder value after an organization experiences a negative event. I expand on this theory by examining one boundary condition that could lead to the opposite relationship: when the organization has a CSR initiative intended to prevent the type of event that occurs. The author argues that activist pressure will enhance the negative relationship between event-specific CSR and shareholder value. Using an event-study, the author examines the apparel industry after the collapse of Rana Plaza which killed over a thousand apparel supply chain employees.

This study aims to illustrate how retail chains with a green image align sustainable logistics actions, logistics measurements and contracts with logistics service providers (LSPs), and to develop a classification model that allows for a description of the various shades of green within companies.

We carried out a multiple case study of four retail chains with a green image operating in the Swedish market, collecting empirical data from the retail chains’ sustainability reports and home pages and conducting interviews with logistics, transportation and supply chain managers.

Based on the literature, we developed a classification model for judging green image, green logistics actions, green measurements and green contracts. The model is used to illustrate the different shades of green found within the respective retail chains. A green image seems well-aligned with green logistics actions. However, there are more levels to judge, and the measurement systems are not sufficiently developed to track green logistics actions. Contract handling is more developed among retail chains than measurements, which is positive, as this is a way of ensuring that LSPs are involved. In our classification model, greenwashing can be judged in a more nuanced way, delving deeper under the surface.

The provided classification model adds to our knowledge and illustrates the alignment within companies’ sustainable logistics. The robustness of the model can be strengthened by applying it to a larger number of cases and by continually validating its content and evaluation criteria.

The study’s main practical contribution is the classification model, which may potentially serve as a method for managers to easily judge the green alignment of a retail chain’s logistics.

Few empirical studies capture how retail chains measure environmental logistics performance, and even fewer concern contracts stipulating the environmental demands placed on LSPs.

Interest in the intersection of sustainability and supply chain resiliency has grown in recent years by managers and scholars. However, examples of how sustainability can improve resiliency are rare. The purpose of this article is to address this dearth of evidence by investigating how sustainable strategies and practices can create more robust supply chains that are resilient to global disruptions. A strategic model of resiliency is introduced based on the supply chain management practices at Dr. Bronner’s, a rapidly growing personal care product company. The case study data explores the relationship between sustainability and resiliency and reveals a potential pathway for companies to merge the two.

This chapter investigates the potential of integrating multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques with decision support systems of digital supply chain management (DSCM) to achieve optimal outcomes. Digital supply chain (DSC) employs digital technologies (DTs) such as artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and big data analytics to provide extensive datasets and valuable insights pertaining to supply chain operations. MCDM techniques employ these realizations to facilitate informed decision-making through the assessment of multiple competing criteria. Usually MCDM approaches are used in the academic research with comparatively lesser application in industry. We argue that MCDM methodologies can play an instrumental role in DSCM, specifically in the areas of supplier selection, demand forecasting, and inventory management. Nevertheless, the integration of MCDM like AHP, ANP, DEMATEL, etc., with decision support systems presents several challenges, including concerns regarding the quality of data and the intricate task of assigning weights to various factors.