Why is sustainability important to operations management?

Sustainable practices in operations help to manage resources efficiently without wasting them and to reduce costs, thereby increasing profits. Adopting sustainable practices helps companies improve their image and their goodwill. The results, published in the International Journal of Operations & Production Management, demonstrate that sustainable operations not only help companies gain a competitive advantage, but also increase benefits for human resources and customers.

Sustainable operations management

aims to make business processes and operations efficient and can continue indefinitely.

This is achieved by restricting the use of limited raw materials, reducing pollution and waste that could destroy the environment, and promoting social and governance policies for the benefit of stakeholders. Research has tended to investigate sustainable exploitation from the perspective of a specialized company, and has often been carried out in the context of large manufacturing companies in the private sector. Functional and systemic aspects of the approach to sustainable development of products and services for industry. These aspects encompass product design and green design, the adoption of environmental and social standards, the improvement of processes and the optimization of operations, procurement, supply chain management (SCM), logistics, including recycling and closed-loop systems, performance measurement, and risk management.

TBL studies have considered sustainable procurement in the public sector, and in the current special issue, studies are emerging on SCM that incorporate the TBL of sustainability, called sustainable SCM. Company officials manage a company's sustainable operations by considering the impact of operations or policies on environmental, social and governance factors.

Business operations

that consider the future impact of operations in order to last over time are called sustainable operations. Longoni and his colleague Raffaella Cagliano, from the Politecnico di Milano, analyzed more than 100 Italian companies in the food industry to see if the sustainable operating practices of these companies were helping to increase their competitive advantage.

This impacts decisions and processes related to all aspects of operations management, such as strategy, design, planning, control and improvement. More recently, studies have tried to investigate social, economic and environmental problems in a combined way, making it possible to analyze the dilemma of sustainability. In this scenario, companies that promote green operating practices improve their public perception as a “green” company and this perception improves customer relationships, loyalty and sales. On the other hand, some recent studies seek to develop conceptual frameworks that explain sustainable waste management and sustainable waste management (Carter and Easton, 201).

Reducing waste would be considered more sustainable, as the planet can only manage a limited amount of waste without producing negative consequences.