Ethics and Sustainability – ‘The Silver Lining’ of Supply Chains

In a world facing huge business challenges, companies have to change the traditional business model and shift towards business models which embed sustainability and ethics. It is a difficult task, given the globalized economy, with highly-interconnected companies, which undertake serious efforts to ensure the sustainability of their actions and supply chains. It is the more difficult to perform this task, as making the business sustainable disadvantages companies from developed countries, in comparison with the supplier companies from less developed countries, which do not have the same pressure, and do not provide the same levels of sustainability and transparency. Sustainability requires higher financial, material and human efforts, reason for which several companies, although wanting to be socially responsible find it extremely difficult. In this paper we analyse the sustainability issues faced by the first twelve companies, ranked by the Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 from 2016 for their supply chain management efforts, and based on the material issues we find at supply chain level, we will propose a supply chain-adapted materiality matrix.