Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
2 Urban Distribution in Sustainable Supply Shain
Management
Traditionally, urban freight transportation planning has been made by the oper-
ating companies. In the last 20 years, we see that the public authorities have
started to get involved into the development of solutions to deal with the major
problems of freight transportation in city centres (Ambrosini and Routhier
2004
;
Munuzuri et al.
2005
): congestion, air pollution, noise and other nuisances.
Therefore, urban logistics researches are in general related to public authorities or
to public—private collaboration, and supply chain management theories and
methods are seldom used when evaluating urban logistics (Gonzalez-Feliu and
Morana
2012
). However, the main organisational aspects of urban logistics
schemes are closer to those of many logistics operators, and a city logistics
solution needs to be considered in a global (sustainable) supply chain management
point of view, integrated in the global chain(s) of the delivered products (Allen and
Browne
2010
). For this reason, it is important to include urban logistics devel-
opments on sustainable supply chain management logic in order to make a strong
link between a city logistics solution and the supply chain(s) it is related to.
Considering the current economic, environmental and social/societal context, it
is imperative that an enterprise thinks ''sustainably''. More and more academic
works are interested to the link between logistics and sustainable development
(Belin-Munier
2010
). Regarding SuSCM, Seuring and Müller (
2008
) consider the
pressures as such legal demands and regulation, customer demands, response to
stakeholders, competitive advantage, environmental and social pressure groups
and reputation. Effectively, logistics is often considered by the different actors as
the ''reason to be'' of each firm belonging to a supply chain. Without logistics, no
raw material can be extracted, transformed and delivered to the final user. As a
natural continuation of the last works on logistics, more concretely those related to
SCM, we reckon that it is now primordial to focus on Sustainable SCM that
associates, reassociates and integrates all the works and reflections on the SCM,
the Green SCM, the Social/Societal SCM, and, of course, all considerations about
the transportation's improvements.
Let us explore first the economic component of SuSCM, i.e. classical SCM.
From the literature in logistics we can retain that Supply Chain Management
(SCM) must be considered by the definition done by CSCMP (Council of Supply
Chain Management Professionals
3
): ''Supply Chain Management encompasses the
planning and management of all activities involved in sourcing and procurement,
conversion, and all Logistics Management activities. Importantly, it also includes
coordination and collaboration with channel partners, which can be suppliers,
intermediaries, third-party service providers, and customers. In essence, Supply
Chain Management integrates supply and demand management within and across
3
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