Sekhar Putcha

Scenarios for Sustainable Supply Chains: a Case for Chemical Industry: Using Scenario Planning As a Tool for Long Range Decisions Sekhar Putcha

The key business drivers for organizations are becoming harder to predict in the fast changing global economy. In particular, the issue of sustainability is rapidly evolving and would be critical in future business decisions. Given this prevailing uncertainty, it is difficult for businesses to plan a long-term supply chain strategy. This book tries to answer the following question "How will uncertainty arising from factors relating to sustainability affect supply chain strategy in the chemical industry?" To answer this question, it is important to envision the future in order to facilitate long range strategic choices. Scenario planning provides an effective way of portraying a picture of the future. The main advantage of using this technique is that it frees decision makers from the biases of routine linear thinking. At the time of developing future scenarios for this book (in 2013) the year 2025 was chosen as a long term future milestone. However, many trends and driving forces relevant to this work are expected to last a couple of decades, thus the scenarios developed in this book might very well extend to a period beyond 2025 as well.