Yann Bouchery

Including Sustainability Criteria into Inventory Models

Research on sustainability performance has considerably enriched operations management literature in recent years. However, work with quantitative models is still scarce. This paper contributes by revisiting classical inventory methods taking sustainability concerns into account. We believe that reducing all aspects of sustainable development to a single objective is not desirable. We thus reformulate the classical economic order quantity model as a multiobjective problem. We refer to this model as the sustainable order quantity model. Then, a multi-echelon extension of the sustainable order quantity model is studied. For both models, the set of efficient solutions (Pareto optimal solutions) is analytically characterized. These results are used to provide some insights about the effectiveness of different regulatory policies to control carbon emissions. We also use an interactive procedure that allows the decision maker to quickly identify the best option among these solutions. The proposed interactive procedure is a new combination of multi-criteria decision analysis techniques.

Impact of coordination on costs and carbon emissions for a two-echelon serial economic order quantity problem

Coordination in supply chains consists in aligning the decisions made by several echelons to reach a globally optimal solution called the centralized solution, and to share the benefits among the actors. This concept has been studied widely from a cost optimization perspective but coordination is also proposed by practitioners and academics as a solution to reduce carbon emissions. This article compares the costs and carbon emissions resulting from a non-coordinated two-echelon serial economic order quantity model to that of the centralized solution. Our model accounts for transportation and inventory related costs and emissions and we consider vehicle capacities. We derive new results to solve the problem in the non-coordinated and in the centralized cases. We provide sufficient conditions ensuring that coordination enables reducing both costs and emissions and we show that these conditions are satisfied in many applications. On the other hand, we also identify situations for which coordination leads to an increase in emissions and we provide sufficient conditions. In such situations, we additionally show how to obtain a solution decreasing both costs and carbon emissions. We use multiobjective optimization to identify all these solutions and we provide a series of insights.

Carbon Footprinting in Supply Chains

This chapter presents an overview of the methods and challenges behind carbon footprinting at the supply chain level. We start by providing some information about the scientific background on climate change. This information is necessary to clarify the overall methodology behind carbon footprinting measurement. We also briefly review the main motivations for carbon footprinting. Then we propose an overview of the main methods available to measure a carbon footprint at the supply chain level. We propose to organize these methods in function of the quantity of information required, and we highlight a trade-off between the scope of measurement chosen and the accuracy of the estimation made. We continue by emphasizing the importance of supply chain (Scope 3) emissions in many supply chains. Finally, the chapter also discusses some challenges related to supply chain carbon footprinting. We specifically consider how to get information in practice, what level of accuracy is needed and how to extend the horizons beyond carbon.

Sustainable Supply Chains

This book is primarily intended to serve as a research-based textbook on sustainable supply chains for graduate programs in Business, Management, Industrial Engineering, and Industrial Ecology, but it should also be of interest for researchers in the broader sustainable supply chain space, whether from the operations management and industrial engineering side or more from the industrial ecology and life-cycle assessment side.

Sustainable Supply Chains: Introduction

As firms become progressively more tightly coupled in global supply chains, rather than being large vertically integrated monoliths, risks and opportunities associated with activities upstream or downstream, will increasingly impinge upon their own wellbeing. For a firm to thrive, it is increasingly imperative that it be aware of economic, environmental and social dimensions of the entire supply chain it belongs to, and that it proactively monitor and manage those. Finding efficient solutions towards a more sustainable supply chain is increasingly important for managers, but clearly this raises difficult questions, often without clear answers. In this introductory chapter, we first provide some insights on what does “sustainable supply chains” mean. Then, we review the main reasons that motivated us to assemble this book at this particular point in time. In a third section, we discuss the five main underlying principles we adopted in designing this book. Finally, we propose some insights on the future of sustainable supply chains.

Hinterland transportation in container supply chains

The increase in traded container volumes worldwide puts pressure on the hinterland road network, leading congestion and emission problems. This leads to a requirement to develop intermodal transportation systems. In this chapter, we analyze the most important features of such container transportation systems for the hinterland supply chain. At the network design level, we review the current state of the art and we identify avenues for future research. Among others, we highlight that the coordination of container shipments across the container supply chain is a particularly relevant issue as hinterland networks involve several actors. At the operational level, we characterize the most important factors influencing the trade-off between intermodal transportation and truck-only deliveries. In addition, we provide a case study of coordination at an intermodal barge terminal in the Netherlands. We highlight that the exchange of information is the key enabler for efficient hinterland intermodal transportation and we show that a better information system can be of crucial importance.