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.