Integrating Lean, Agile, Resilience and Green Paradigms in Supply Chain Management (LARG_SCM)

1.1 What is the problem? Different management paradigms, such as the lean, agile, resilience and green have been adopted for the management of supply chains. The lean supply chain is a paradigm based on cost reduction and flexibility, focused on processes improvements, through the reduction or elimination of the all “wastes”, i.e., non-value adding operations (Womack et al., 1991). It embraces all the processes through the product life cycle, starting with the product design to the product selling, from the customer order to the delivery (Anand & Kodali, 2008). The agile supply chain paradigm intends to create the ability to respond rapidly and cost effectively to unpredictable changes in markets and increasing levels of environmental turbulence, both in terms of volume and variety (Agarwal et al., 2007). However, when organizations are subject to eventual disruptions, caused by sudden and unforeseen events (like economic and politic crisis or environmental catastrophes), the lean practices may have contributed to rupture conditions (Azevedo et al., 2008). In a global economy, with supply chains crossing several countries and continents, from raw material to final product, those events (even if they happen in a remote place) can create large-scale disruptions (Craighead et al., 2007). These disruptions are propagated throughout the supply chain, causing severe negative effects in supply chains leading to unfulfilled orders. So, it seems that what can be good from the competitive point of view, can cause a disaster on crisis situations; it may be worst if the organizations can not be resilient and robust enough to recover the loosed competitiveness. In actual competitive market, it is necessary that supply chains become more resilient to disruption events (Sheffi & Rice, 2005; Tang, 2006). Other pertinent issue in supply chain management is the environmental sustainability. The green supply chain management is as an important organizational philosophy to achieve corporate profit and market share objectives by reducing environmental risks and impacts while improving ecological efficiency of these organizations and their partners (Rao & Holt, 2005; Zhu et al., 2008). As a synergistic joining of environmental and supply chain management, the competitive and global dimensions of these two topics cannot go unnoticed by organizations.