Sürdürülebilir tedarik zinciri yönetiminin önemi ve lojistik firmalarının rekabetçi avantajına katkısı

Today as never before, there is considerable attention and concern over environmental and ecological issues. Social, economic and environmental aspects of every enterprise have drawn the attention of managers and public. Business practices regarding sustainability are gaining growing attention and the applicable initiatives lead to competency for firms. Considering the role of competitive strategies for implementing the sustainability initiatives requires deep Investigation from both Industry and academic level. The intensified competition among the organizations to become global and environmental friendly, causes supply chain managers to contemplate a group of elements upstream and downstream side of the of their supply chain. Recognition of sustainable supply chain management enforces firms to contemplate SSCM as an excellence flag to maximize the profit level, manage the risk possibility and reach an outstanding brand image. Sustainable supply chain management is defined in literature as "The creation of coordinated supply chains through the voluntary integration of economic, environmental, and social considerations with key inter-organizational business systems designed to efficiently and effectively manage the material, information, and capital flows associated with the procurement, production, and distribution of products or services in order to meet stakeholder requirements and improve the profitability, competitiveness, and resilience of the organization over the short and long-term". SSCM's target is to distribute enhanced quality level of products and services while increasing efficiency, customer satisfaction, waste and cost reduction and act environmental-friendly. Previous studies are mainly focused on investigating the role of operational tools that can improve environmental performance of the firms. There is a need to increase the understanding of the relationship between competitive strategies and sustainable supply chain management initiatives Furthermore, recent literature implies that shippers' demands for environmental-friendly logistics services are also increasing. Although the green supply chain management field has been rapidly evolving for the past 20 years, there still exists significant necessity for further development. In this research, based on the delineated characteristics and attributes of SSCM, the final objective would be to specify the most contributing factors of social, economic and environmental pillars of sustainable supply chain management and figure out how these would prepare the prerequisite for competitive advantage to the firms. Through the comprehensive literature review, it has been tried to figure out the most and highly cited indicators of sustainability pillars. There was a vast amount of indicators mentioned for each pillar of sustainability through the supply chain management literature, which are presented later with their related references. It has been tried to select the most pertaining and effective indicators, which will elaborate the importance of sustainability initiatives. A preset of indicators were prepared for each pillar of SSCM and later these indicators were discussed with expert logistic consultants and practitioners. The final set of indicators are prepared considering feedbacks from expert and scholars in supply chain and logistics field. Beside this the most common and efficient competitive strategies which are highly mentioned by studies through the last years are investigated. From all these studies, the highly cited competitive strategies are those which are introduced by Porter , namely as cost leadership strategy and differentiation leadership strategy. In this research, cost leadership and differentiation strategies are selected as two main categories of competitive strategies which are implemented by firms. Then three pillars of sustainability are classified considering two competitive strategies. Social and environmental initiatives of sustainability are categorized as differentiation strategies and economic initiatives of sustainability are categorized as cost leadership strategy. Differentiation strategies are explained as the initiatives or actions which are implemented to offer a unique product or service. Considering the defined purpose of differentiation strategy, the social and environmental initiatives which are taken into account by firms while designing to make their supply chain more sustainable could offer their customers a unique type of service, which will in turn improve their brand image, customer satisfaction level and eventually competitiveness in the market. Cost leadership strategies are defined as the tremendous effort which is shown by organizations in lowering their costs. Regarding this definition economic initiatives of sustainability are pertaining to any actions or plans which could lower the expenses of organization's operations. It is necessary to mention that in some cases implementation of sustainability initiatives might increase the costs of organizations at first point but in long term this will result in saving additional cost for organizations. For instance, green building and fuel-efficient cars are two cases which requires initial investment by firms which in long-term would control fuel consumption level and lower the allocated budget amount for such expenses. Considering the nature of the research and the diversity of indicators for assessment, a multi-criteria decision making method is selected as the methodology approach of this research project. Since there was no secondary data available for this research the primary data is collected through questionnaire. The questionnaire is prepared in two language, Turkish and English via google forms. The questionnaire is distributed to mainly two group of respondents, which were experts (scholars) and industry people. The experts were including the academicians with expertise in sustainability, logistics and supply chain management and logistics consultants. The industry group of respondents were including, logistic practitioners, supply chain managers, retailers, shippers and logistics managers. The questionnaire is distributed via email, phone call, face to face interview and LinkedIn contacts. Through LinkedIn it has been tried to contact the related people who has experience in logistics and supply chain management investigating their profile and written experiences. Beside this, the international logistics and service provider companies in Istanbul are contacted to inquire for their cooperation in our data collection process.The implemented methodology is a multi-criteria decision making method which is called Best Worst Method. The method is firstly defined by Rezaei, and has been applied to many research since 2015. The defined indicators for each pillar of sustainability are received their weights which are calculated based on the collected information from respondents via questionnaires. Then considering these weights the indicators are prioritized and their importance level is elaborated from market and firm point of view. The comparison analysis among these factors and their achieved weights is implemented and explained in chapter four of this research. These results are useful for firms and organizations which are seeking to figure out which indicators have the higher level of importance. In order to the point that there is a vast amount of indicators for sustainability measures, it is crucial to figure out the most influencing and applicable indicators for organization. The different level of importance of indicators which could be applied to improve sustainability performance of firms necessitates that organizations must investigate on the most pertaining indicators for their organizations. The results of this research project elaborates the existing doubts and concerns from market point of view while assessing their suppliers or service providers. Deliberation of these requirements from market side, would clarify the most efficient and applicable initiatives, so the organizations could chose precisely about their strategies and investments. The study would also delineate the importance of competitive advantages which are the result of sustainability initiatives that protects and improves firm's position in the competing market.