The market opening and the globalization of supply chains, demand a structural changes in which logistics has a strategic role. Nowadays, clients evaluate product quality, its value added and its availability in time and form, which implies a need to make the process efficient. Several experts...

Major businesses around the world have been trying to reduce the total cost and wastes across their supply chain to remain competitive in the expanding global market. Hence, a collection of reliable tools and techniques are vital for decreasing costs and wastes and for providing effective...

Currently, distributed supply chain production planning (SCPP) is a practical problem affecting global supply chain production. Distributed SCPP is a complex constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) comprising a series of constraints intra- and inter-production members on orders, capacity, and...

The design of supply chain networks subject to disruptions is tackled. A genetic algorithm with the objective of minimizing the design cost and regret cost is developed to achieve a reliable supply chain network. The improvement of supply chain network reliability is measured against the supply...

One emerging tool to measure the social-related impacts in supply chains is Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA), a derivative of the well-established environmental LCA technique. LCA has recently started to gain popularity among large corporations and initiatives, such as The Sustainability...

The necessity of sustainability evaluation is rapidly growing alongside the expansion of civilization. Likewise, the supply chain suitability improvement is a need that has arisen in the petroleum industry, especially as it is responsible for the most part of CO₂ emissions in the atmosphere. The...

The extent to what bad labor conditions across the globe are associated with international trade is unknown. Here, we quantify the bad labor conditions associated with consumption in seven world regions, the “bad labor” footprint. In particular, we analyze how much occupational health...

Qualitative interviews with participants in the cocoa (<em>Theobroma cacao</em>) supply chain in Costa Rica and the United States were conducted and supplemented with an analysis of the marketing literature to examine the prospects of organic and Fairtrade certification for enhancing environmentally and...

Data collection, or the inventory step, is often the most labor-intensive phase of any Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) study. The S-LCA Guidelines and numerous authors have recommended generic assessment in this first phase of an S-LCA. In an effort to identify the social hotspots in the supply...

This paper presents a refined means of conceptualizing the combination of sets of integrated business processes and activities that since the late 1980s has come to be known as the “supply chain.” It identifies specific sets of processes and activities, “channels,” by the primary...