Building Sustainable Supply Chains

Sustainable supply chains offer a response to multiple, often interwoven, problems including environmental degradation, rising prices for energy and raw materials, and global supply chains linking labor and environmental standards with legal and consumer expectations across countries. Managing complex relationships, flow of materials, and environmental and social issues that impact participants at every step of the supply chain pose key challenges, yet managers can derive value through sustainability initiatives such as lowering waste, minimizing environmental and compliance risk, and improving brand value and long-term stability of their supply base. 

In this webinar, we will look at ways managers can formulate effective business and supply chain strategies that lead to an actionable, proactive agenda for sustainability that not only ensures profitability for the firm, but also social and environmental responsibility. We will focus on the environmental impact of the extended supply chain that includes suppliers, third-party service providers and consumers, and take a cradle-to-cradle approach that includes product design, raw material sourcing, manufacture, transportation and storage, consumer use and eventual disposal and recycling. Concepts will be illustrated with real-world examples, insights from scholarly research and case studies. 

Aditya Vedantam is an associate professor of operations management and strategy in the UB School of Management. He holds a doctorate in management from Purdue University and a master’s in engineering from University of Michigan. His research focuses on sustainable and socially relevant operations with emphasis on clean energy technology development, recycling and reuse in supply chains.