ABSTRACT
From an industry perspective, despite widespread agreement on the importance of sustainability aspects for long-term competitive advantages, often companies need strong triggers in order to put into action initiatives for integrating these dimensions in their strategies. On one side, legal regulations, responsibility to stakeholders, customer demand, reputation loss, and environmental and social group pressures are often listed as triggers for companies to implement sustainability. On the other side, some barriers to implementing actions for an SSC are (Piplani et al., 2007)
1. The cost of implementing measurement systems for sustainability 2. Problems defining a value for the output with respect to environ-
mental outcomes 3. The perception that data to be collected from different actors in the
network is not manageable and will have a low impact on the global outcome
4. Difficulties taking unpopular and high-priced decisions for the network
In order to overcome these limits, researchers and managers are trying to answer the following questions:
• How should a supply chain accomplish the trade-off between economic and noneconomic objectives while making managerial decisions?
