Exploring construction supply chain management: A systematic perspective for creating sustainable performance

At the global level, it is well acknowledged that the concept of sustainable development has particularly become a major development policy for the industry, especially for the construction industry. This is because the construction industry plays an important role in the economic development of the country. Besides the economic development, the construction industry also has negatively environmental impacts regarding intensive resource usage, high contribution of CO2 emissions over the building lifecycle, and excessive energy consumptions. The development towards sustainability in construction industry requires active policies to ascertain the common directions in which, processes/activities need to be improved in order to generate a positive contribution for more sustainable patterns in a long-term perspective. Consequently, numerous building regulations and policies have been formulated to control the construction performance, called as "sustainable construction". And these regulations and policies intensely influence on the adoption of construction practices. Coupled with sustainable development policy, various sustainable rating systems for construction (such as LEED, SBTool, BREEAM, and CASBEE) have been developed to actively provide some guidance on the way forward for mature practices. In addition to the regulations imposition, sustainable construction is also becoming a business marketing strategy for a long-term competitiveness. As a result, construction industry around the world is attempting to perform their tasks in a more sustainable way, responding to the regulations pressure along with the marketing pressure. Traditionally, the construction industry has been seriously facing the performance-related problems, which need a systematic view for the successful management of construction activities throughout the building lifecycle phases. For this reason, there is an increasing interest in the adoption of supply chain management principles for improving construction processes as more effective and efficient (Thunberg and Persson, 2013). The construction supply chain typically focuses on the beginning phase of building lifecycle, considering its mission accomplished once the building has been completed. However, it has been found that most of the research is focused on the short-term objective of construction supply chain, which may not respond to the overall building performance. Focus of these research studies is mainly limited to the improvement of specific processes and activities such as logistics process, production process and procurement process. To effectively improve the sustainability in the long-term perspective, numerous studies have indicated that construction companies require the active role of different actors in a construction supply chain, with a collaborative working relationship (Bankvall et al., 2010; Lonngren et al., 2010; Nwokoro and Onukwube, 2011; Palaneeswaran et al., 2003; Pan et al., 2010) and address sustainability-related issues to the construction activities throughout the building lifecycle (Bribian et al., 2009; Lonngren et al., 2010; Ortiz et al., 2009; Sev, 2009; Verbeeck and Hens, 2010). Consequently, the move towards sustainability in construction industry necessitates a systematic management of the whole process of building lifecycle phases through the collaboration among different construction actors and all stakeholders.