A New methodology to identify supply chains sustainability bottlenecks

The world globalization has been creating a very strong competition amongst companies. To maintain their market position, companies need to guarantee that all their activities are performed with high efficacy and efficiency standards, allowing not only a business profit but also a good company image among their stakeholders. Such reputation is not definitely related only to the service level and the economic performance but also to the way environmental and social aspects are treated within the companies’ strategy. This thesis explores these concerns and presents a simple and systematic methodology (SustainSCVSM) for supply chain analyses. SustainSC-VSM is composed of a value stream map and a complementary analysis which is based on the Sustain-Pro methodology. SustainSC-VSM will screen and identify the main bottlenecks, regarding sustainable factors (economic, environmental and social) in any supply chain. Moreover, SustainSC-VSM proposes an information factor in order to improve the coordination among the supply chain actors and their sustainable performance. A set of new indicators is applied during the analysis; these indicators aims to identify the bottlenecks in terms of sustainability of the supply chain. The analysis of these indicators points out the issues to be improved, when the future state Value Stream Map is designed. A set of best practises is also presented as a guideline to undertake this last step. A case study is presented to highlight the applicability of the developed methodology. The obtained results point out the direction to harmonize business efficiency standards and sustainability in the supply chain