Minimizing the Carbon Footprint Through the Design of Sustainable Supply Chains

It's official -- our paper, "Sustainable Supply Chain Network Design: A Multicriteria Perspective," has now been published in the International Journal of Sustainable Engineering. It appears in the September issue, volume 3 (2010), pp. 189-197 and can be accessed here.

The paper already has been receiving a lot of attention based on queries that I have gotten from publishers to expand the paper into a book.

With all the disasters in the world from floods to heat waves and fires, rigorous methodological tools that determine how to minimize the carbon footprint through sustainable supply chain network design can make a big difference in terms of emissions and costs.

Supply chains, as complex networks, consisting of manufacturing plants, different modes of transportation and distribution, as well as possible storage technologies, can span the globe and, hence, identifying the optimal design of such networks in terms of both costs and emissions, notably, in terms of the carbon generated, can impact not only a firm's profits but also its reputation through an enhanced environmental reputation.

We are delighted that our research and paper can contribute in this direction.

Mergers and Acquisitions, Energy and the Environment

The New York Times is reporting that the number of mergers and acquisitions of energy companies is growing and that energy companies are increasingly seeking to acquire new sources for energy exploration. Companies are focusing on buying small, growing companies or on acquiring companies that expand their reserves in a period in which it is hard for them to find new places to drill. Targeted companies include companies in Africa as well as those that control drilling fields in deep waters in the Gulf of Mexico.

A recent study of ours, Environmental and Cost Synergy on Supply Chain Network Integration in Mergers and Acquisitions, that I co-authored with Dr. Trisha Woolley, appears in the recent volume, Sustainable Energy and Transportation Systems, Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Multiple Criteria Decision Making, Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, M. Ehrgott, B. Naujoks, T. Stewart, and J. Wallenius, Editors, Springer, Berlin, Germany (2010) pp 51-78. In this paper, we developed a multicriteria supply chain network model to assess the possible cost and environmental synergies associated with supply chain network integration as in mergers and acquisitions. This work has direct relevance to energy companies who are considering whether to acquire or merge with an existing energy company (or not).

We have also (with Woolley and Dr. Patrick Qiang) developed metrics to assess the synergy associated with the supply chain network integration of multiproduct firms in the case of mergers and acquisitions. That paper, entitled, Multiproduct Supply Chain Horizontal Network Integration: Models, Theory, and Computational Results, will appear in the journal International Transactions in Operational Research.