Analytics-enabled Green Supply Chain Management

Abstract: The fashion industry with its complex supply chains deals with increasingly problematic environmental issues. IS and specifically analytics technologies are said to provide fashion companies with crucial insights to improve their environmental impact. However, these promises of this so-called analytics-enabled Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM) are not fully materializing in the European fashion industry. Guided by a conceptual model based on the TOE framework, this study critically explored the main organizational challenges fashion companies face in this context by conducting six qualitative interviews and contrasting the empirical findings with current academic literature. As a result, 55 challenges for analytics- enabled GSCM were identified of which 15 were considered highly relevant. Overall, a low technological maturity, the lack of awareness regarding the benefits of Analytics as well as the deficient visibility into the complex supply chain were identified as main issues for analytics- enabled GSCM. Based on these findings an IS research agenda is proposed