FOCUS
Starting at the
SOURCE Since the beginning, we have always talked about the environment being greener, but we neglected the social sides of matters, at least on the research side. Of course, there were people in ethics conducting research, but we were not confronting this topic sufficiently in the supply chain. Constantin Blome, Professor of Operations Management and Associate Dean for Research, University of Sussex Business School, takes his research path to criticize just like a mirror to pinpoint what the whole discipline probably has done and what should be considered for the future in research to do even a better job that helps people on the ground.
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UST like there are many waves in the ocean, in the academic citation data too, we can already see that in the last year, the citation rate for sustainable supply chain research is far lower than what you would expect for Covid related research. While that's completely natural, we should not forget that there are so many topics and many questions unanswered for each of these waves, be it operations excellence, supplier management, or quality management. Of course, as research professionals, we have to jump on the new waves to address because there are societal needs, but I think, at the same time, we should not forget that we also address topics that are still out there in the more classical domains. If you look at the supply chain, we typically have three challenges in this sustainable supply chain field… first, let's take the example of Nestle to understand what's happening in their upstream supply chain. Around 278,000 people are working in the upstream supply chain, but more than 25 million people are impacted through their upstream supply chain. If
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we calculate GHG emissions and water consumption, we would be surprised to realize that the footprint is enormous. It makes sense for firms to concentrate on ensuring sustainable supply chains. If you optimize your sustainable footprint, that would be great. Still, the big lever and the big necessity lie in the upstream matters, which is a bit difficult because the supply chain cuts through multiple institutional contexts. We did the sustainable procurement training for Nestle on a global roll-out happening from Switzerland for different categories. We aimed to help these firms during this journey because they had a question. We could help them understand how to better conduct due diligence in the supply chain, a chain of custody for different areas of cocoa, coffee, fish, etc., which proved to be quite insightful.
WHEN IT'S THE SLAVES THAT PAY Academically speaking, the most severe environmental and social breaches happened in the upstream supply chain. Lead firms have inadequate information
Prof. Constantin Blome’s research interests include supply chain management, procurement, and operations management, with a strong focus on sustainability, innovation, and risk issues. Constantin is also co-owner and board member of two companies: n-side is one of the fastestgrowing companies in Belgium, specializing on the optimization of energy markets and clinical trial supply chains. He studied at the University of Bielefeld and Technical University of Berlin (M.Sc. and Ph.D.) and finished his habilitation at EBS Business School, Germany. He is also a certified purchasing and supply manager (C.P.M. and CPSM).
about their lower tier suppliers and have limited control, and very often, it's the sub-suppliers that are not visible for the focal firm; however that's all clear, but we very often think about sustainable supply chain management from the focal firm side, and my view is that this is not really helping too much because we need to understand that there will be potential extra benefits for the focal firm. But we neglected the triple bottom line, as I mentioned earlier of the local people. Also translating to the Indian context, you might think about tree plantation, the garment industry if you can pursue sustainable supply chain management, one side of the coin is to think about the focal firms and then how they benefit and implement, but even more important is, of course, if you talk about sustainability that this happens on the ground, at the source, at the local site. In our earlier studies, we realized that companies perform supply chain due diligence only to create an impression on their consumers that they are ethical firms. However, we figured that the objective costs, in comparison to their
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