Towards Collecting Sustainability Data in Supply Chains with Flexible Data Collection Processes

Abstract

Abstract. Nowadays, OEMs from many domains (e.g., electronics and automotive) face rising pressure from customers and legal regulations to produce more sustainable products. This involves the reporting and publishing of various sustainability indicators. However, the demands of legal entities and customers constitute a tremendous challenge as products in these domains comprise various components and sub-components provided by suppliers. Hence, sustainability data collection must be executed along the entire supply chain. In turn, this involves a myriad of different automated and manual tasks as well as quickly changing situations. In combination with potentially long-running processes, these issues result in great process variability that cannot be predicted at design time. In the SustainHub project, a dedicated information system for supporting data collection processes is developed. This paper provides three contributions: (1) it identifies core challenges for sustainable supply chain communication, (2) it reviews state-of-the-art technical solutions for such challenges, and (3) it gives a first overview of the approach we are developing in the SustainHub project to address the challenges. By achieving that, this comprehensive approach has the potential to unify and simplify supply chain communication in the future.

Sustainability Assessment in Automotive and Electronics Supply Chains—A Set of Indicators Defined in a Multi-Stakeholder Approach

“…Requirement (5), adaptability to regional and cultural characteristics, was addressed by focusing on the specifications of the European automotive and electronics industries via the selection of sources, as in Fritz et al [18] as a basis for the various aspects of sustainability, and by the integration of European industry experts via the interviews and focus groups. Grambow et al [61] identify the following seven challenges of collecting sustainability data throughout supply chains: (1) dynamic selection of involved parties; (2) access to requested data; (3) meta data management; (4) request variants; (5) incompleteness and quality; (6) monitoring; and (7) run time variability. Although these challenges can mainly be addressed technically, the following points do have to be considered during the indicator development phase since the choice of indicators determines which sustainability data are exchanged.…”

“…The indicator set complements previous work on the data challenges, namely, on the aspects of sustainability, the ASSC framework, the aggregation methods and the plausibility checks [12,18]. Since products in the automotive and electronics industries consist of a large number of individual components and sub-components, supply chain sustainability assessment requires the collection of heterogeneous sustainability data throughout intertwined and non-transparent supply chains [61]. These highly complex, cross-organizational data collection processes pose further technical and organizational challenges that need to be addressed.…”

“…Technical challenges occur due to the need for exchanging sustainability information between supply chain partners and are related to aspects of internal and external data management (e.g., integration into existing product lifecycle management (PLM) and product data management systems (PDM)), as briefly outlined in Section 4.3.2 and discussed in more detail by Grambow et al [61].…”

“…Technical challenges occur due to the need for exchanging sustainability information between supply chain partners and are related to aspects of internal and external data management (e.g., integration into existing product lifecycle management (PLM) and product data management systems (PDM)), as briefly outlined in Section 4.3.2 and discussed in more detail by Grambow et al [61]. One approach to addressing these three challenges is the use of a data exchange hub for sustainability information, as was developed in the course of the research project "Sustainability data exchange hub-SustainHub" [65,66].…”