Abstract

Delivering superior performance than competitors has always been the significant force for any company’s success and companies are constantly endeavoring for different initiatives to gain advantage over their competitors. Recently, green supply chain management has been receiving great interest from researchers and practitioners. Consideration has been given to consider environmental factors in entire supply chain starting from the procurement, production, transportation, consumption, and post disposal of products for making the whole product life cycle green. The main objective of the study is to identify the relationship between ISO 14001 and green supply chain management and how it can be used for green supply chain planning. The thesis is divided into two parts. In the first part, we decide whether ISO 14001 practice is beneficial to make supply chain green and in the second part we identify the customer and the technical requirements for green supply chain planning on the basis of ISO 14001, investigate their relationships, and propose a QFD based approach for selecting best green supply chain initiative(s) for organizations.
The data for the study is collected from published reports of 20 different companies belonging to three sectors namely food and beverage, transportation, and retail that are implementing green practices in their supply chain. The proposed approach has strong practical applicability for organizations considering investing in ISO 14001 for improving green supply chain performance.