Enhancing sustainable supply chains through traceability, transparency and stakeholder collaboration: A quantitative analysis

Abstract

Traceability and transparency are essential for sustainability in complex global supply chains (SCs), but they remain elusive goals in practice. Scholars and practitioners consistently advocate collaboration amongst SC stakeholders as a means of enhancing them, yet little is known regarding their interrelation and contribution to sustainability. We adopt the SC practice-based view (SCPV) to propose and test an explanatory model elucidating how to deploy collaboration, traceability and transparency to achieve triple bottom line (TBL) performance within global SCs. Focusing on the paramount example of complex fashion-apparel SCs, we analyse the insights gained from 139 suppliers—typically ignored in favour of focal firms—using Partial Least Squares Structural Equations Modelling. Our results provide a concrete battery of not-necessarily complex or inimitable activities empirically proven to help put traceability and transparency into practice to achieve TBL performance. The SCPV approach contends that everyday practices, activities and relationships amongst SC stakeholders underpin TBL performance.