Enablers to implement sustainable initiatives in agri-food supply chains

By Sachin Kumar Mangla, Sunil Luthra, Nick Rich, Divesh Kumar, Nripendra P. Rana, Yogesh Kumar Dwivedi. International Journal of Production Economics, 2018

314 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Due to rapid agricultural industrialization, increased global food demand, and, increasing concerns related to food quality and safety, the concepts of sustainability and supply chain transparency are becoming critically important to the agriculture and agri-food sector. The new focus on sustainability performance objectives emphasizes the effective utilization and consumption of natural resources to balance ecological, economic and societal aspects of agri-food businesses. The management of sustainability adds a new demand on business managers who often have small profits and receive stringent requirements from large powerful customers and retailers. In this paper, we recognize and analyze the key enablers in implementing sustainable initiatives for Agri-Food Supply Chains (A-FSCs). Ten important sustainability driven enablers were considered from a rigorous literature review and phase of expert consultation. The identified enablers were then analyzed using a combined Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) - fuzzy Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) based framework. The ISM approach enabled an appreciation of the contextual relationships among the enablers and to classify the enablers based on their driving and dependence potential. The fuzzy DEMATEL technique supported the determination of the influential and influenced enablers and also to categorize them into cause and effect groups. An empirical case study, drawn from a vegetable and fruit retail supply chain in India, is used to focus and test the applicability of the proposed research framework. The paper facilitates professional management practice and researchers to uncover and explore the enablers for the real execution of sustainability oriented initiatives in the agri-food business sector.

Subfields: Business and International Management, Food Science, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/788f8ce51ec7e5c2c04da8780b5323fa860bc007

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Citations in the corpus

Barriers to the adoption of industry 4.0 technologies in the manufacturing sector: An inter-country comparative perspective (2020, methodology): “Three different Multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques – AHP, ISM and DEMATEL – are widely applied to analyze and establish relationships between barriers (Mangla et al., 2018).”
A framework to achieve sustainability in manufacturing organisations of developing economies using industry 4.0 technologies' enablers (2020, background): “Similarly, “adoption of machine learning system”, “effective execution of process optimisation techniques”, “practising advance quality improvement techniques” are some of the critical enablers that smoothen the pathway to sustainability [47].”
Challenges in perishable food supply chains for sustainability management: A developing economy perspective (2020, methodology): “Government support is also necessary for horizontal integration of farmers through farm producer organization (FPOs) and cooperatives (Ali et al., 2018; Mangla et al., 2018).”
Industry 4.0 as an enabler of sustainability diffusion in supply chain: an analysis of influential strength of drivers in an emerging economy (2019, methodology): “Other methods, like the AHP technique is not able to map the interdependence and the cause–effect relationship between the factors (Mangla et al. 2018b).”