Green Supply Chain Design and Management

Abstract

The chapter highlights the ultimate aim of the five activities of buying, making, moving, storing, and selling to deliver a product to a customer in a supply chain. With increasing emphasis on consumer response and increasing globalization of the market, companies have seen an explosion in the number of different products that they have to offer and an increase in the frequency of new product introductions. Established players can no longer afford to concentrate on the economies of scale by producing standardized products. The important aspects that companies must focus on are total quality, customer satisfaction, reduction of time to market, manufacturing integration with R&D and marketing, and worldwide strategy and alliances. Life cycle management of a product includes product identification, product design and development, product introduction, product sustenance, and product phase out. The chapter describes in detail all these stages with the aim to show that life cycle of products can be easily integrated in a supply chain framework, and concludes that it is possible to further improve the supply chain efficiency by acting at the different stages of the life cycle of the products.