Providing Efficient Decision Support for Green Operations Management: An Integrated Perspective

Green operations management (GOM) has emerged to address the environmental and social issues in operations management, so that the Triple Bottom Line (3BL) sustainability can be achieved simultaneously (Rao & Holt, 2005; Zhu, Sarkis & Geng, 2005). The concept of GOM was originally formed in the 1990s. Early research on GOM mainly directed towards segmented areas of operations management, such as quality management. Over the past decades, GOM has attracted significant research interests from academia, many issues remain under-addressed which have hindered the effectiveness of GOM practice (Zhao & Gu, 2009; Yang et al, 2010), although the needs for and benefits of GOM cannot be overemphasised for sustainable development (Svensson, 2007). One of the main reasons for GOM lagging behind quality management advances has been identified as lack of true integration of environmental and social objectives into business operations, i.e. environmental management and social values were viewed as narrow corporate legal functions, primarily concerned with reacting to environmental legislation and social codes of practice. Subsequently research and managerial actions focused on buffering the operations function from external forces in order to improve efficiency, reduce cost, and increase quality (Carter & Rogers, 2008; White & Lee, 2009). Research further reveals that the root cause behind the company’s isolated approach to the 3BL sustainability is not because the managers do not appreciate the importance and urgency of addressing them, but lack of efficient support for the management of the complexity of sustainable decisions, especially the provision of powerful analysis approach to support effective decision evaluation (Hill, 2001; Taylor & Taylor, 2009; Zhao & Gu, 2009). This paper proposes an integrated sustainability analysis approach to provide holistic decision evaluation and support for GOM decision making. There are two key objectives to explore the integrated approach: (a) to understand the GOM decision support requirements from a whole life cycle perspective; (b) to address the GOM decision support issue using multiple decision criteria. Based on a case study in production operations area, the paper concludes that the integrated sustainability analysis can provide more efficient and effective support to decision making in GOM.