Conference Agenda

The growing demand for batteries has increased the importance of secure, sustainable, and resilient battery value chains. At the same time, battery manufacturers face new challenges arising from regulatory requirements, sustainability objectives, critical raw material dependencies, and operational disruptions. These challenges require companies to consider compliance, transparency, circularity, and supply chain risks alongside traditional objectives such as cost, quality, and delivery performance.

Although large volumes of compliance, sustainability, and operational data are becoming available, limited research has examined how this information can support battery value chain reconfiguration. Existing studies often address compliance and resilience separately, providing limited guidance on how assessment results can be translated into value chain adaptation and reconfiguration decisions.

Meanwhile, Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS) provides the mechanism for discovering and selecting alternative actors and capabilities within the value chain. Extending upon this concept, this paper proposes a conceptual framework for sustainable and compliant battery value chains integrating MaaS as an enabling mechanism for reconfiguring distributed manufacturing resources. The framework consists of assessment, filtering and evaluation of value chain actors using compliance information and regulations, sustainability indicators, and operational data such as geographic location, logistics, and disruptions. This enables decision-makers to evaluate and compare different viable reconfiguration alternatives.

The applicability of the proposed framework is demonstrated through a proof-of-concept decision support tool, applied within a battery value chain context. Using lithium-ion batteries as the unit of analysis, the tool illustrates how regulatory compliance, sustainability requirements, and operational performance can be integrated to reconfigure the value chain. Following the framework, the tool first applies compliance-based filtering and subsequently evaluates feasible configurations according to criteria such as cost, lead time, capacity, distance, emissions, and resilience.

In conclusion, this research contributes a structured approach for transforming compliance, sustainability, and operational information into value chain reconfiguration decisions. This approach supports the development of sustainable, resilient, and compliant battery value chains.

In both the present and the future's increasingly competitive environment, operations managers need to prioritize sustainability (Swink et al., 2020). Thus, this study focuses on identifying the dimensions of sustainable operations management (SOM). The study, through a systematic literature review, identifies three core practices of sustainable operations management: sustainable product design, sustainable manufacturing processes, and sustainable supply chain management. The study further investigates the indicators of SOM for each sustainable operations management practice. Hence, through a rigorous exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of 220 large manufacturing firms in Ethiopia, the study validates measures of SOM practices. Although the systematic literature review identified 6, 8, and 15 indicators for sustainable product design, sustainable manufacturing processes, and sustainable supply chain management, respectively, the EFA yielded 5, 8, and 9 indicators for these areas, respectively. Subsequently, to determine the most influential sustainable operations management practices and the key indicators within each, five experts from both academia and industry were engaged. A multicriteria decision-making approach—specifically, the Analytic Hierarchy Process—was applied to rank the practices and identify the indicators with the highest priority for operations and supply chain managers. The findings reveal that sustainable manufacturing Process is the most influential practice, followed by sustainable supply chain management and Sustainable Product Design. The robustness of the results, confirmed through sensitivity analysis, demonstrates the reliability of the analytic hierarchy process model for sustainability-related decision-making. The findings offer valuable guidance for manufacturing managers and policymakers on prioritizing sustainability efforts and allocating resources efficiently, as we have identified and ranked sustainability indicators specific to manufacturing firms in an emerging-economy logistics setting.

Despite intensifying environmental sustainability pressures, industrial firms continue to face challenges in embedding sustainability-oriented practices within their supply chain and logistics operations and translating them into tangible competitive and performance gains. Although Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM) is increasingly adopted as a strategic response, its operational effectiveness in generating sustained competitive advantage and improving organizational performance remains insufficiently understood within emerging economies. This study addresses this gap by examining the direct and mediated relationships between SSCM practices, competitive advantage, and organizational performance in Ethiopian manufacturing firms, with a focus on key sustainable supply chain mechanisms, including environmental conservation, supplier collaboration, logistics optimization, green product design ensured with green warehousing, and material reuse. A quantitative research design was employed using survey data collected from 221 managers and supervisors through structured questionnaires. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) using SmartPLS 4.0 was applied to assess both measurement and structural models. The measurement model demonstrated satisfactory reliability and validity, with all factor loadings exceeding 0.70, composite reliability values above 0.80, and average variance extracted (AVE) values above 0.50. The structural model results revealed that SSCM practices have a significant positive effect on competitive advantage (β = 0.702, p < 0.05) and organizational performance (β = 0.301, p < 0.05). Competitive advantage also exhibited a strong positive influence on organizational performance (β = 0.331, p < 0.05). Mediation analysis using bootstrapping confirmed that competitive advantage partially mediates the relationship between SSCM and organizational performance, indicating both direct and indirect effects of SSCM on performance outcomes. The model further demonstrated satisfactory explanatory power (R² = 0.493 for competitive advantage and R² = 0.536 for organizational performance). From a theoretical standpoint, the findings extend the Resource-Based View (RBV) by empirically validating SSCM practices (logistics optimization, supplier collaboration, material reuse, and green product design ensured with green warehousing) as eco-centric supply chain capabilities that serve as strategic drivers of competitive advantage within an underexplored emerging economy context. Practically, the study provides actionable insights for supply chain professionals, demonstrating how operationalizing logistics optimization, collaborative supplier management, green warehousing, and reuse of materials serves as a critical mechanism to drive superior competitive positioning and organizational outcomes.