The journey to sustainable logistics

Abstract

Decentralised and globally operating organisations that engage in both urban and rural environments encounter the complex challenge of uniformly developing and implementing sustainability initiatives across these diverse spaces. Addressing this challenge necessitates a coherent strategic alignment, underpinned by a comprehensive narrative. This serves as a framework for the global and regional management of an organisation, as different regions may be characterized by different economic and cultural requirements. Such a narrative is instrumental in mitigating the risk of organisational islands while simultaneously enabling the formulation of region-specific strategies. To achieve this, it is imperative to foster robust communication and collaboration between decentralised and central organisational units, ensuring that overarching organisational objectives are harmonized with regional requirements. The effective integration of these units cultivates a shared understanding of the organisation's broader goals and minimizes the potential for fragmentation into island units. These challenges can be illustrated particularly well in the logistics sector. Global supply chains, from product manufacture to the end customer, pass through many stages and are therefore faced with different technological, cultural and organisational challenges. In the absence of a cohesive sustainability strategy, decentralised organisations are at significant risk of devolving into independently functioning islands. Similar challenges are faced by transnational organisations in particular, as the balance between global integration and local adaptation is often insufficiently guaranteed. This problem also affects the organisation examined as an example, whose structure and challenges reflect typical characteristics of transnational organisations and require a targeted strategic orientation. As an outcome, maintaining effective communication across management, departments, and employees is critical to establishing a unified understanding of objectives, priorities, and the pathways to achieve them. The lack of empirical evidence often makes well-founded decisions difficult, with subjective assessments playing a dominant role. In addition, external influences, such as the EU taxonomy, further increase the complexity of decision-making by placing additional demands on transparency and sustainability. This dissertation addresses the complex challenges faced by decentralised and global organisations operating in urban and rural areas, particularly in the development and unified implementation of sustainability initiatives. To explore these challenges, the dissertation utilizes a mixed-method approach that includes a systematic literature review, two qualitative empirical analyses and a conceptual framework. The qualitative analyses were conducted in collaboration with a global logistics organisation that is undergoing a transformation process to systematically integrate sustainability into its profit centres. The first analysis, which is a literature review, examines what technological solutions exist for road logistics in urban areas that do not fit into the traditional CEP (courier, express and parcel) framework. The results show that the existing literature focuses predominantly on urban CEP logistics, while detailed studies on general cargo or groupage logistics are largely lacking. The second analysis, a qualitative empirical analysis, examines how corporate structures need to be restructured in order to integrate the concept of sustainability into a profit-oriented organisation, taking into account organisational islands in the introduction of new technologies. It also analyses which variables are necessary to accommodate different regions. The results show that a basic narrative must first be established in order to operationalize sustainability issues across the supply chain. In addition, it must be ensured that the variables are not weighted differently within the organisation and interpreted by management and that the different variables are taken into account when scaling in the respective regions. The third analysis and the second qualitative empirical approach examines the different interpretations of sustainability in international freight transportation between Germany and Turkey. The results show that cultural differences and knowledge management are very different within an organisation comprising different units. These organisational islands and cultural differences require different approaches to explain and integrate sustainability in order to promote employee acceptance and address regional challenges more effectively. The fourth and conceptual analysis explores how technological connections can support the standardisation of sustainability within a supply chain by integrating key performance indicators for reporting and standardisation of measures. This approach should work across organisations and map various spatial differences with clear metrics that allow management to evaluate along the supply chain.