A framework for sustainable performance assessment of supply chain management practices

The introduction of the concept of sustainable development in supply chain management has been identified not only as a constraint but also as a way to improve performance, impacting the competitiveness of a company and of its supply chain organization. To evaluate and analyze the potential relationships between traditional supply chain management practices and their impact on performance, we propose a framework for sustainable performance characterization and an analytical model for sustainable performance assessment. The framework is used to characterize a company's sustainable performance in the economic, environmental and social fields. The analytical assessment model, based on the relationships between a supply chain management practice and the three fields of sustainable development, serves to produce the sustainable performance profile of a practice, identified by a triad. An application of this profile to two well-known best practices of supply chain management allows us to identify their performance from a sustainable development point of view. Practitioners can easily use the proposed framework for highlighting SCM practices that impact sustainable performance more positively, depending on their objectives. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.