Building credibility within sustainable supply chains: toward a conceptual model

Supply chain managers face many challenges when developing more sustainable operations, often beginning with translating ambiguous demands from stakeholders into practice. Drawing from accounting and sustainable supply chain literatures, we synthesize a model to explain how supply chain managers might define, defend, and rationalize sustainability in their supply chain, which we term sustainability assessment and verification. This multi-dimensional model extends traditional thinking about supplier monitoring and collaboration in several ways. For example, both supplier and customer uncertainty must be explicitly addressed, and managers must recognize that the process for SAV is at least as important as the output.