Sustainable supply chain in product development

Abstract

There exists an urgency for organizations all over the world to consider sustainable supply chain strategy in product development. Every firm needs to provide a safe working environment and reduce its ecological footprint as well as ensure returns to its investors. This calls for cross-functional integration, better decision making and performance improvement. Every stakeholder in the supply chain is responsible to ensure its’ sustainability. Several incentives can be found in adopting a sustainable supply chain management strategy. Sustainable supply chain management pushes the system towards forethought, exploration and data analysis in business so as to measure up to the expectation of customers and flourish in the long run. The focus of this study has been on why a company requires sustainable supply chain management and how it would benefit by implementing a sustainable supply chain management strategy. The core aspect was to analyze the advantages of sustainability in a supply chain and how everybody would be motivated to work towards it. Main outcome from the research is that stakeholders in different domains are more or less similar but the challenges and motivations of stakeholders are different in different domains. It is required to consider the domain specific characteristics for inclusion of sustainable supply chain in product development. A conceptual strategy is proposed to include sustainable supply chain in product development.