Sustainable Design Process to achieve Sustainable Logistics : Opportunities offered by Business Analytics

Logistics is a rapidly expanding industry, and mobility is critical to our way of life. At the same time, there are several environmental, societal, and economic implications associated with logistics transportation, including pollution, noise, and the use of urban space for transportation infrastructure. Business analytics solutions may help firms with logistics operations achieve these targets, while keeping costs down and positively impacting the society. However, many corporations haven’t venture into business analytics to achieve sustainability. The main reasons are the need to customize analytics solutions for each business problem as well as the lack of a viable, coherent process model closing the loop between sustainability objectives and analytical questions, metrics, and tools. This paper introduces a functional framework for sustainability analytics, which can be implemented in any corporation, making the planning, controlling, and measuring of sustainable development easier. The resulting business analytics blueprint, called as “Sustainability Design Process”, is suitable to effectively implement sustainable logistics using business analytics approaches such that there is a balance between economic, environmental, and societal factors.