Green Supply Chain Management: Strategy to Gain Competitive Advantage

Abstract

advantage and improving organizational performance. With increasing competition in today's global market, the firms have to look to the modern strategic manners, in order to gain sustainable organization and competitive advantage. GSCM as a new innovative managerial tool can be used as a strategic weapon to gain competitiveness and to promote the firms environmental and financial performance simultaneously (Hajikhani et al., 2012). GSCM as a strategy to gain competitive advantage means the orienting empirical study shows that there is a substantial interest amongst the companies to take action to decrease their environmental impact. The goal of adding value to the business and reducing costs in all parts of the production system is identified as key drivers in order to increase competitiveness. The companies agree that the common manufacturing objectives such as cost, quality, delivery and flexibility will not be enough in order to stay competitive when external stakeholders require an increased focus on sustainability. Hence, a need for investigating how environmental sustainability can be integrated to create a competitive production system has been identified. The perspective then changes from greening as a burden to greening as a potential source of competitive advantage. According to Simpson and Samson (2008) there are 4 (four) strategies to gain competitive advantage in the use of GSCM: (1) Risk-based Strategies, (2) Efficiency-based Strategies, (3) Innovation-based Strategies, and (4) Closed-loop Strategies.

Keywords: Green supply chain management (GSCM), competitive advantage, risk-based strategies,  efficiency-based strategies, innovation-based strategies, and closed-loop strategies.