Over the last few years, market demand in terms of sustainability has become increasingly pressing. Re-thinking and re-planning companies’ activities from a sustainable perspective is no longer a voluntary choice but has rather become a duty: today companies are called upon to question their own environmental impact. Sustainability, intended not just in terms of environment, has thus become an important driver for all business decisions concerning supply chain activities and processes: today we call it Sustainable Supply Chain (SSC).

While sustainability issues are growing in importance and are escalating the agendas of C-executives worldwide, the methodologies and approaches to manage them are just starting to develop and to be embedded along companies operational and strategic routines.
One of the major challenges relies in the alignment between traditional performance indicators (such as profitability, productivity, service performance, quality, etc.) with new indicators introduced by sustainability related topics (e.g., carbon footprint indicators, LCA, scope 1-2-3 decomposition of company’s footprint, resource consumption, circularity index, etc.). As most of the times, when trying to pursue different objectives on different performance (such as the one of sustainability and profitability) the outcome may result in a trade-off situation which may leave the company in a strategic impasse.
This situation highlights the emerging need for tools and methodologies able to support multi-performance decision making across company’s levels in rapid times and with reliable results.

In order to provide decision makers with a holistic overview on performances, dynamic simulation modelling appears to be very suitable for this purpose. The reason for adopting a quantitative technique such as simulation modelling, capable of describing the behavior of the analyzed variables over time, is simple: since environmental sustainability is measurable in quantitative terms, there are no explicit reasons to exclude this area of analysis from the panel of performance simulated in a model or in a scenario.

Since the model is usually used to represent and simulate, with high accuracy, a specific company’s supply chain and its related performance, it could be easily expanded also to track and estimate the environmental footprint of the supply chain itself, which is mainly caused by the production and transportation of goods across the value chain.

Once validated, the supply chain model (which under certain conditions may evolve in a supply chain digital twin) is then capable of estimating concurrently both financial, operational and sustainable performance of the value chain. This characteristic provides decision makers with punctual and reliable insights on what could be the real impacts, benefits and threats of implementing certain decisions, especially when trying to enhance the sustainability performance.

For a better understanding of this methodology, this article presents a case application of simulation modelling for the deployment of the sustainability strategy of a company working in the dairy industry.