An Essay on Green Supply Chain Design and Dynamic Alignment

New developments in supply chain management bring attention to the fact that companies need to dynamically manage different supply chains together in order to properly respond to divergent customers' buying behaviour. In order to do so, some authors propose that four basic supply chain types exist: fully flexible, agile, lean and continuous replenishment. Each one of these supply chains has different requirements in terms of the structure of their network design. Some need a faster, more adaptive and distributed network of facilities, while others require a rather stable and centralized structure. Nowadays, with the emergence of the green supply chain management paradigm, when designing and realigning supply chains according to customers behaviours, one needs to consider several environmental issues related, for example, to energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, material consumption and waste generation. This paper investigates how different supply chain types serving different customers profiles can manage several network design tradeoffs in order to properly answer some relevant green supply chain management requirements. In order to do so, a theoretical framework combining these three concepts is proposed and discussed.