An integrated sustainability analysis approach to support strategic decision making in green supply chain management

Abstract

Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM) has recently emerged to address environmental concerns in production and service operations. Existing research has investigated environmental sustainability issues at isolated stages of a supply chain. This paper aims to address the GSCM strategic decision making issues in a coherent manner. The paper proposes an integrated sustainability analysis (ISA) approach which seamlessly integrates Life Cycle Assessment into Multi-Criteria Decision Making process. Application of the integrated approach to an industrial decision case demonstrates that the proposed approach can provide concerted scientific backup to efficiently and effectively support strategic decision making in GSCM. The ISA approach has the potential to enable true integration of environmental management responsibility across multiple stages of supply chains.