A sustainable urban logistics dashboard from the perspective of a group of operational managers

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a sustainable dashboard for evaluating the sustainable performance of urban delivery systems from the perspective of operational logistics managers, one of the categories of stakeholders given less consideration by public authorities in their quest for consensus. Design/methodology/approach – First, a synthesis of the main works on the subject is proposed to provide a common grid of economic, environmental and social/societal indicators for sustainable supply chain management (SSCM), after which the method for defining the dashboard is presented. This method is derived from a collaborative decision-support approach and applied to a panel of operational logistics managers. Using a co-constructive method, a group of experts is consulted first separately, then by small groups and then a group restitution and consensus search process is made to find an agreed-upon set of indicators. Findings – The results show a difference between the indicators chosen in the individual phase and those defined in small groups. They also show a gap between classical expert-obtained indicators (mainly made by one or a small group of non-operational experts) and the proposed dashboard, made by and for operational managers. Originality/value – The originality of the paper is that it addresses two issues (urban logistics evaluation and consensus search) by using methods of natural and active pedagogy and shows by an experimental method the interests and opportunities of collaboration in defining sets of indicators for urban logistics evaluation.