BUS606: Operations and Supply Chain Management

Recommendation: Top Management Support: Development of an Integrated Sustainable NPD-SSCM Strategy, Resource Allocation, Financial Support, and Common, Shared Information System
• Set the sustainable vision, mission, scope, goals, and explicit strategic targets that effectively direct NPD decisions towards sustainable products.
• Develop a cohesive sustainable NPD strategy as well as a green company policy.
• Align the organization and its associated supply chains toward delivering sustainable products and services.
• Support through resource allocation, financial support, and a common, shared information system.
• Develop specific managerial skills and coordinate processes for all three aspects of sustainability.
• Adopt proactive supply chain practices.
• Align sustainable NPD through processes and products.
• Provide process management support through buyer-supplier integration and such activities as creating a management-level sustainability position and employee sustainability training.
• Encourage social sustainable development through increasing designer social knowledge, improving transparency, and encouraging fair trade practices.
• Support the development of a common, shared database for integration.
• Negotiate NPD-SSCM application and align with products and processes.
• Develop a green company policy.
• Create a management sustainability position.
• Increase management knowledge through entrepreneurial and innovation skills.

Recommendation: Focus on marketing demands.
• Develop market planning initiatives with a focus on end customer requirements.
• Incorporate sustainability into NPD by evaluating product safety for the end-user.
• Detect marketing needs for ecological and social demands and restrictions.
• Evaluate market changes to comply with company goals, resources, and capabilities.
• Analyze the market for sustainable needs and capabilities.
• Develop procedures and rules to encourage green NPD development.
• Evaluate consumer's care for the environment and community – and how much they are willing to pay to support these concerns – and develop appropriate sustainability strategies.
• Manage environmental impact through goal-oriented and market-based mechanisms that provide flexibility.
• Consider market orientation, green targeting, green positioning, and customer outcomes influence green NPD.
• Use structured management processes to bridge market and process management.

Recommendation: Supplier/Customer Integration
• Select partners with the same guiding sustainability principles.
• Co-evolving, collaboration, and joint development of products and processes that discourage pollution. Prevention and innovative environmental technologies, joint knowledge development, and development of a code of conduct.
• Use environmental requirements in the process of selecting new suppliers as well as the continual evaluation of existing suppliers.
• Develop closer relationship with suppliers by holding regular meetings for enhanced communication, activities that focus on communication and trust-building toward better relationships, and a focus on improving joint decision-making.
• Encourage a moderate level of cross-functional integration, and either a low or high level of customer integration into NPD efforts.
• Encourage collaboration and communication between supply chain members through procedures that encourage a proactive sustainability approach.
• Identify risks associated with environmental and social problems prior to public exposure.
• Analyze the entire product lifecycle.
• Develop partners through assistance and teach new methods, training, providing expert knowledge, and financial support.
• Information and data flow between supply chain members encourages collaboration and NPD efforts are more effective.
• Institute activities that ensure that suppliers use environmentally sensitive procedures.
• Pay attention to monetary and non-monetary costs of implementing integration practices in NPD that may outweigh the benefits. A moderate level of cross-functional integration but either a low or extensive level of customer integration (not moderate) in NPD is recommended.
• Encourage social sustainability in the form of decent working conditions by supplier employees by providing training and expert knowledge.

Recommendation: Integrated Networks (Practices/Processes & Information Technology Management)
• Streamline formal processes and coordination between the stakeholders.
• Use product data management, process improvement management, and engineering project management to address the globally-dispersed processes that extend across departments, companies, and international borders.
• Incorporate Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) best practices into sustainable NPD, including formalization of processes (such as product-focused sustainable data handling processes, process flexibility improvement; common change management processes for economic and environmental success, and workflow management for economic process execution) and cross-functional work (including cross-company and cross-functional sustainable process alignment).
• Support Enterprise Resource Planning system data interchange between supply chain members.
• Use a product/process approach to avoid un-necessary steps that do not support sustainability efforts.
• Use a central location for data management and storage to reduce data duplication and data inconsistences.
• To mitigate the increased risks associated with SSCM, companies should utilize individual company monitoring, use generalized standards and certifications (such as ISO-14001).
• Establish a central location for data management and storage, and use a common development platform.
• Security concerns across informational boundaries increase with SCM; however, through trust–building procedures, collaboration between supply chain members improves.

Recommendation: Coordinated, Cross-functional Team
• Require and support departmental cross-functional collaboration.
• Must be supported by top management.
• Define development team roles clearly.
• Include globally-inclined sustainability experts.
• Collaboration improves through sharing information which focuses the organization on common goals, sharing resources, communication, creating knowledge, using common procedures, trusting, and jointly making decisions.
• Remove barriers that inhibit collaboration such as functional silos and silo thinking solely focused on economic development.
• Adopt a product/process approach.
• Encourage a resource-based view that reviews inter-firm resources towards increasing competitiveness.
• Encourage cross-functional and cross-company environmental and social data provisioning.
• Manage key sustainability resources.
• Define and jointly control data management resources.

Recommendation: Clear Product Vision
• Develop a clear definition of products.
• Integrate a seamless product delivery process for new product introduction.
• Match market requirements and value stream objectives.
• Develop a clear, defined, sustainability scope and targets that are operationalized.
• Meet a minimum threshold of acceptable performance.
• Use customized tools, databases, design for sustainability methods, and supply chain tools.
• Respect sustainability issues in process definitions.
• Define roles and responsibilities clearly.
• Educate and encourage NPD designers in sustainability.
• Build active knowledge networks.
• Management needs to establish specific sustainability targets.
• Balance program and project management toward a standardized sustainable product development process.
• Address aesthetic design advantages, which is especially important for sustainable products.
• Encourage use of Design for the Environment, design-oriented work for green operations, and green supply chain management.
• Understand the entire lifecycle, the impact upon the environment at each of its stages, and incorporate product attributes and manufacturing processes into design.
• Address remanufacturing design concerns, such as product/component durability, level of re-manufacturability of products, managing the highly unpredictable return stream, consumer preferences between new and re-manufactured products, and supply constraints.
• Consider appropriate alignment of re-manufactured products to its associated reverse supply chain.
• Address Extended Producer Responsibility issues associated with new product and its associated processes.