How different factors lead to different types of Green Supplier Development: A Multiple Case Study Approach

Details

Supervisors

Blome, Constantin

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de gestion

Abstract

Increasing environmental pressures have step by step forced companies to pay attention to their environmental impact. To reduce their impact, companies have developed green supply chains, requiring their suppliers to improve their own performance. To support the suppliers in their improvement effort, companies can resort to green supplier development. A lot of elements influence the adoption and success of the supplier development and green supplier development. Many different activities and different types of supplier development and green supplier development are put in place by companies with their suppliers. No research has been conducted on the elements that lead to the adoption of a certain type of green supplier development. The master thesis investigates this gap by exploring how different factors would lead to different types of green supplier development. Two research questions have been developed: • How is GSD developed in the firm? • Which factors lead to the choice of the GSD activities? In order to answer them, we performed a multiple case study on five large and international companies from different industry sectors. In-depths interviews were conducted with managers from these companies and additional information was collected online. Intra-case analyses were done. The company green supplier development activities were described and through them the type of green supplier development performed was identified. At the same time, the factors that could explain the company choice of green supplier development activities were looked for. Then a cross-case analysis was done: via a comparison of the information of the different cases, factors potentially leading to a certain type of green supplier development types were looked for. We contribute to the research with two propositions. First we propose that “having an end-to-end supply chain approach leads a company to implement direct green supplier development”. As this end-to-end approach implies that resources are already engaged and that a relationship with the suppliers is already established, we think that it will lead the company to implement direct green supplier development activities. Second we propose that “healthcare regulations may represent, for the drug producers or their suppliers, a barrier to conduct indirect and direct green supplier development with the production activities related suppliers”. The healthcare regulations force a drug producer to record any change occurring in its process, products or supplies and prove that the change has no effect on its final product. It takes a lot of time and money to comply with these regulations and so, the producer will avoid the changes. This means that drugs producers might be reluctant to engage in green supplier development activities that could imply changes in production processes or products.