Mohammad Nishat Faisal 

ABSTRACT

In recent times societies are beginning to feel the impact of fast depletion of natural resources and thus sustainable development has emerged as the only alternative for future growth. There is now a wide agreement  that sustainability could be achieved through the effective balancing of social, environmental and economical objectives. Also, it is widely organized that an organization’s sustainability initiatives and its corporate strategy must be closely interwoven, rather than separate programs that are managed independently of one another.  In this regard, agenda 21 of Rio-Declaration proposed integrated systems of management to ensure that environmental, social and economic factors are considered together in a framework for sustainable development. One of the major challenges in adopting sustainability is to develop metrics that could effectively  capture organizations performance on all the three dimensions.

 In this interconnected world it is acknowledged that supply chain can play a vital role in achieving sustainability. Recent research also suggests that supply chain that integrate social and environmental resources are difficult to imitate and could provide competitive advantages to the firm. In a supply chain as we move away from the focal large corporation particularly on the supplier side, many companies in tier I and majority in tier II are small and medium enterprises. With the advent of Internet and globalization of world economy, organization can easily find and integrate partners around the globe The real challenge lies in  measuring the partners performance on sustainability dimension as companies in tier I and tier II play a vital role in the transformation of a supply chain into a sustainable entity. Though, there are many metrics to measure sustainability of an individual corporation there exists few measures in context of supply chains. Even, if they exist, they are complex and difficult to be adopted by small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

Using digraph and matrix method this research enunciates a simple method to quantify supply chain sustainability for small and medium enterprises. It proposes a numerical index which can be used to measure sustainability for different supply chains in actual practical settings. This approach also provides the opportunity to visualise variable interdependencies at system level and also presents a method to compare supply chains on sustainability dimension. The research would help to understand the dynamics between different variables and sub-variables of a sustainable  supply chain and more importantly it would facilitate organisations to identify the areas in which the supply chain is lacking and need immediate attention to improve the overall supply chain sustainability. Numerical assessment of supply chain sustainability by transforming it in an index is a unique attempt in the area of supply chain management.