Green Six Sigma

Chapter 8Green Six Sigma and Green Supply Chain

‘When we walk away from global warming, when we don't advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy.’

– John Kerry

8.1. Introduction

A supply chain, in simple terms, is a network between the suppliers to source the materials, the producer to convert them into products and the distributors to distribute the products to customers. The network could be complex involving many activities, people, facilities, information, processes and systems. In a typical supply chain, raw materials are procured (some local and some imported) and items are produced at one or more factories, transported to warehouses for intermediate storage and then transported locally and internationally to retailers or customers. With supply chain management the flow of materials and flow of information across traditional functional boundaries is seen as a single process. These flows are depicted in a simplified model in Figure 8.1. Thanks to ease of travel, the media and the ‘world wide web’ customers have never been more informed than they are today and they know what they want. This is especially true in service industries. As a result of the heightened expectations of customers, operations managers in service sectors also have been forced to using the principles of supply chain management.

Figure ...