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Supply chain sustainability
Supply chain sustainability

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6 The four perspectives of supply chain sustainability: a self-assessment

Now that you have reviewed the potential usefulness of the four perspective on supply chain sustainability, and you have seen a selection of examples and cases from practice, to wrap up this course, let’s do a self-assessment. Depending on the size of the organisation that you work for, and depending on your role and level, you may be very familiar with your context. But even then, we argue, it is good practice to assess, or re-assess, the performance of the organisation from these four perspectives.

Activity 6: Sustainable supply chain self-assessment

Timing: 45 minutes

Taking into explicit consideration components of the four perspectives that we have discussed in this course, you should now analyse your organisation. Use this Excel spreadsheet [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] to do the following:

  1. Rank how your organisation is performing for each aspect (good, average or poor).
  2. Rank the importance of the criteria for each aspect (low, medium or high).

Based on the rankings that you have given your organisation, the spreadsheet will return an outcome that a specific aspect is either ‘fine’, ‘needs to be watched’ or whether ‘action needs to be taken’.

For any aspect that is not ‘fine’, do the following:

  1. Analyse the causes and potential consequences that this may have on the sustainability of the supply chain.
  2. Devise a strategy for solving or improving the outcome of these underperforming aspects.

Taking into consideration your initial analysis (under 1 and 2) and your explanation and interpretations of the outcomes (under 3 and 4), now do the following:

  1. Revise the components under each of the perspectives and see if there are any measures that you can add in the table, then rank your organisation and explain your findings.

There is no discussion for this activity.