Payman Ahi

Measuring social issues in sustainable supply chains

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the metrics used in the literature to measure social issues in sustainable supply chains. Design/methodology/approach – A systematic literature review was conducted to identify peer-reviewed articles containing metrics pertaining to social issues in the supply chain. A structured content analysis of each identified article was conducted to extract the metrics. This analysis provided a basis for a frequency analysis to determine how often the various metrics appeared in the literature. The metrics were also analyzed to determine whether they: simultaneously addressed the other areas of the triple bottom line, namely, environmental and/or economic issues; were quantitative or qualitative metrics; and could be classified as absolute, relative or context-based metrics. Findings – A total of 53 unique metrics were identified. The analysis of the results showed that a limited number of environmental (3 metrics) and economic (11 metrics) issues were addressed by...

A stochastic approach for sustainability analysis under the green economics paradigm

Sustainability is an increasingly important factor in today’s globally competitive environment. How sustainability features are prioritized in terms of relevance and significance is a function of many factors, including variations in types of business, operational conditions, history and other characteristics particular to a company. The purpose of this paper is to propose a stochastic model that explicitly addresses the potential barriers and enablers to sustainability in order to measure and assess the sustainability level of a company. Given that the potential barriers and enablers to sustainability are context dependent, the stochastic model developed in this paper assumes that a variable characterization of sustainability functions can describe a realistic analytical model for a company’s sustainability behavior. By adopting the strong sustainability perspective, a case scenario is used to demonstrate the application of the proposed model in a major Canadian electric utility. By providing relatively simple and informative measurement, the proposed sustainability model can be used as a practical and effective tool to assess the sustainability level of any company under consideration and to evaluate sustainability fluctuation of the company over time.

Using Pseudo Variables in Probabilistic Survivability Model for Powder-Compacted Parts

Compaction is a critical stage in the powder metallurgy process that greatly influences the mechanical properties of the finished part. To improve these properties, higher compaction pressures are employed. This makes unloading and ejection of a green compact more critical for the powder-compacted parts with relatively complicated shapes. In this paper, a survivability model concerning failure during unloading and ejection stages is developed. Considering green compact characteristics, a relationship between experimentally determined green strength, mechanical loads during ejection, and survivability of a powder-compacted part is presented. A case study is used to demonstrate the application of the model.