Abstract

Every company may be located at the junction of several Supply Chains (SCs) to meet the requirements of many different end customers. To achieve a sustainable competitive advantage over its business rivals, a company needs to continuously improve its relations to its different stakeholders as well as its performance in terms of integrating its decision processes and hence, its communication and information systems. Furthermore, customers’ growing awareness of green and sustainable matters and new national and international regulations force enterprises to rethink their whole system. In this paper we propose a model to quantify the identified potential risks to assist in designing or re-designing a supply chain. So that managers may take adequate decisions to have the continuing ability of satisfying customers’ requirements. A case study, developed at kuehne + nagel Luxembourg is provided sustainability

 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays, the sustainability concept  has been further developed and companies need to understand that today, it is far more complex than understood by most managers. The literature review performed in the second section, yield that the sustainability concept is far more advanced and complex than admitted by most managers and researchers. Many authors have shown interest in integrating the sustainability concept into their researches by focusing on the economic and ecological aspects, neglecting the societal one. Most managers understood the concept of sustainability being the solely implementation of green practices, which are impossible to measure and to compare. Effectively, many managers frequently fall into old ways of thinking, implementing Total Environmental Quality Management (TEQM), and claiming their companies being sustainable. A Logistics Service Provider (LSP) needs to evaluate his existent supply chains to get an overview of the current As-Is situation, so that the latter may be corrected in the sense of continuous improvement. This overview is indispensable for managers, taking decisions of how to implement the upcoming proceedings on an operational, tactical or strategic level, i.e. in the short, mid and long term. It must however be noted that each amendment of a SC entails risks. Managers need to decide if the latter are taken, mitigated, or avoided. Consequently, the implementation of a SC’s re-design requisites a risk analysis a priori.