Lean and green supply chain management through intermodal transport: insights from the fast moving consumer goods industry

Abstract

Combining efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability is crucial for companies to succeed in today's context of fierce competition. This paper investigates how intermodal transport can be adopted for managing supply chains according to a Lean and Green approach. A scenario-based estimation tool was developed to quantify the potential demand for intermodal transport. The tool was applied to the Italian Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) supply chain. Following, a single longitudinal case study on a FMCG company (Procter & Gamble) was carried out to investigate the enabling factors for the adoption of intermodal transport. Our results show that it is possible to shift demand from road to rail: a number of pathways for action were identified that related to planning and management, assets, train services, collaboration, legal issues, and incentive schemes. Also, a collaborative business model for making the modal shift possible was presented. This paper is original because it offers an investigation of Lean and Green Supply Chain Management through intermodal transport by adopting a supply chain perspective and providing a bridging link between academic studies and field evidence.

Lean thinking in the highways construction sector: motivation, implementation and barriers

“…Those underlying concepts and principles are (1) elimination of the process wastes (Hodge, Goforth Ross, and Joines 2011;Thürer, Tomašević, and Stevenson 2017), (2) effective management of the value stream and establishing long-term alliances with the supply chain (Serrano Lasa, Castro, and Laburu 2009;Colicchia, Creazza, and Dallari 2017), (3) maintaining a continuous and reliable flow of the production and process elements (Storch and Lim 1999;Negrão, Godinho Filho, and Marodin 2017), (4) pullbased production planning and control (Slomp, Bokhorst, and Germs 2009;Zegarra and Alarcon 2017), (5) just-in-time delivery of materials and components (Bamber and Dale 2000;Chiarini 2017), and (6) instilling a continuous improvement culture (Lyons et al 2013).…”

“…In parallel with Japan's successful post-war recovery and emergence as a global economic power, Japanese manufacturing techniques have been benchmarked by Western manufacturers since the 1970s (Drucker 1971;Sugimori et al 1977). Although the diffusion of lean thinking had started in discrete manufacturing industries in the West in the 1980s, the publication of a business book, "The machine that changed the world" by Womack, Jones and Ross (1990), fuelled a debate in both the practitioner and academic communities concerning the applicability of the lean approach outside discrete, repetitive industries (Oppenheim 2011;Lyons et al 2013;Costa and Godinho Filho 2016;Dora, Kumar, and Gellynck 2016;Colicchia, Creazza, and Dallari 2017).…”

Green BPM as a Business-Oriented Discipline: A Systematic Mapping Study and Research Agenda

“…For instance, well-established optimization methods such as Lean or Six Sigma (i.e., Quality Control tradition) were absent in our sample. Although some literature on these topics and environmental sustainability exist [71,72], the Quality Control topics are insufficiently incorporated in the field of Green BPM. Hence, to further develop Mode 1 research, we advocate the involvement of research participants from the different Green BPM traditions, and especially from the still under-respresented Quality Control and Business Management traditions.…”

Influence of Different Sales Models on Psychological Reactance of Consumers in Online Shopping of Fresh Fruits

“…Under the background of economic globalization, the growth rate of China's fresh fruit exports is accelerating. In order to further increase the fresh fruits in China, it is necessary to form a complete industrial chain in production, storage, transportation, processing and sales to satisfy the consumers' psychological needs (Šerić & Pranič evič , 2018;Colicchia, Creazza, & Dallari, 2017). More and more consumers have an 1 School of Management, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou 221116, China.…”