Implementation of Sustainability in Ongoing Supply Chain Operations

The need to take the sustainable agenda beyond its technological outset and include operational and supply chain practices is well-established, but still very little has happened and the supply chain and operational logics have remained largely unaffected. This paper asks why this may be the case and investigates what happens in the translation from ambitious strategic goals to operational practices.
To do this an exploratory case study is presented detailing the efforts of a large Danish manufacturing company to introduce an ambitious sustainability agenda in its ongoing supply chain operations. The study aims to develop a deeper un-derstanding of the, inter-functional coordination and operational practices related to introducing the sustainable agenda in the supply chain. The study points to a lack of tangible environmental performance measurements related to day-to-day practice in the ongoing supply chain, and secondly it points to incoherent functional logics as the main factors preventing effective implementation. As an effect of a lack of strong incentives and loose couplings at the cross-functional and inter-organizational level we find support for a lack of formalized integration of sustainability into operations and clear systemic approach of how to approach and manage cross-functional engagement.