Session: 06-07-01- Sustainable design

Paper Number: 95030

95030 - Supply Chain As a Complex System: Environmental Impact Evaluation and Perception 

Nowadays corporates must involve the whole value chain to achieve their goals and fulfil their customers’ needs by providing the best solutions in the shortest time and cheaper price. It is then justified the need for solid and flexible supply chains, that are covering larger and larger areas over the globe. An enterprise must model, plan and manage at its best the product supply chain and dealing with the increasing considerations and implications of its characteristics means to manage a complex system. A complex system is composed of many interacting parts, often called agents, which may exhibit collective and complex behaviors. The collective behavior of the parts entails emergence of properties that can hardly, if not at all, be inferred from properties of the parts.

Customers are aware of the complexity of the supply chains and they usually link this complexity, made of multiple actors and actions, to a high environmental burden. However, if not coupled with quantitative results, this may be overestimated, both by consumers and enterprises. In addition to the fact that corporates are willing to acquiesce customers’ needs, a misleading perception may encourage enterprises to focus on optimization of non-overriding aspects of a product supply chain.

The present paper proposes a deep environmental evaluation of a corporate supply chain; this involves actors in all three continents. Subsequently the obtained results are compared to the consumers and employees’ perceptions, and to the remaining product lifecycle stages. The opinion of customers and employees are collected and analyzed from questionnaires while the product environmental burden is assessed through the Life Cycle Assessment Method. The case study involves the environmental analysis of three products used in the swimming activities. The design and prototyping phases take place in Italy, while the goods are manufactured in China. They are further commercialized all over the world. The environmental analysis enabled the identification of the most impacting lifecycle phases.

The discussion reveals how important is to quantify and rationalize the environmental impacts of a complex system, not to threaten to focus on optimization of secondary aspects. The End of Life and Transport phase are perceived as high impacting, but the Life Cycle Assessment reveals that Raw Materials and Manufacturing phases retain the highest impacts and are the first that should be improved.

Consequently, a proper dissemination and communication strategy should be carried out by the company to enhance the effort made to improve the effective key-factors of the product lifecycle.

Presenting Author: Federica Cappelletti Università Politecnica delle Marche

Presenting Author Biography: Federica Cappelletti graduated on October 2019 at “Univerist&#224; Poitecnica delle Marche” in Mechanical Engineer. Her field of research is Sustainable Design for Mechanical Engineering. <br/>Her research activity is mainly focused on: study and development of methods and tools for the environmental sustainability of the product/process/service in order to support first design phases; evaluation and quantification of the environmental sustainability impact of product/process/service/supply chain through the application of Life Cycle Assessment methodologies and tools.

Authors:

Federica Cappelletti Università Politecnica delle Marche
Roberto Menghi Università Politecnica delle Marche
Marta Rossi Università Politecnica delle Marche
Michele Germani Università Politecnica delle Marche