Development of a Strategic Framework for Sustainable Supply Chain Management

It is widely agreed that properly establishing a sustainable supply chain strategy to yield competitive advantages is essential for business enterprises, and a number of research papers on sustainable supply chains have been produced over the last two decades. However, many past studies on sustainable supply chain strategies emphasized either classification schemes or various coordination mechanisms, and few of them have focused on an integrated framework for sustainable supply chains. Therefore, the objective of this study is to develop a strategic framework for the sustainable supply chain management. The study is based on the abductive reasoning process through literature review to establish a strategic framework which is ranked through grey relational analysis (GRA). The weighted data of various strategies collected from the elite interview prove to be comprehensive and evaluable, so it can create values for supply chain members in practice. The results further suggest that each sustainable supply chain in different fields can select the best combination of strategies through GRA to constantly facilitate performance of sustainability. The main contribution is the submission of a strategic framework which makes up the insufficiency of past research papers lacking an integrated strategic framework. At the same time, the proposed strategic framework has also been illustrated through a case study.