Integrating Sustainable Product and Supply Chain Design: Modeling Issues and Challenges

Promoting sustainability within business operations requires sustainable products, processes, and system, i.e., sustainable supply chains (SSCs). To efficiently reduce environmental and societal impacts of supply chains (SCs) while maintaining continued profitability, it is necessary that the entire SC is designed and managed from a total life-cycle perspective considering coordination between product, process, and SC design. Coordinating product and SC design decisions play a critical role in improving the SSC's performance. The product design determines all its future costs, both in forward and reverse-flow, which in turn depend on the SC configuration such as the number and location of SC partners their capabilities and capacities. Therefore, coordinating sustainable product and SC design decisions requires consideration of all four product life-cycle stages and incorporating a closed-loop flow within the SC. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it emphasizes on the need and importance of coordinating product and SC design decisions in SSCs (through illustrative case studies) and the limitations of existing models from a SSC perspective. Second, the paper explains some of the challenges that need to be addressed while developing such holistic integrated models, provides key factors influencing their performance, and thereby proposes a framework to perform this coordination.