Report_Team#1. Part 2.

1. I. Factors influencing sustainability

As sustainability was defined like a state of the social and natural systems, it has its own factors and indicators. You can see the scheme of factors division in the frames of the company.

Pic.2. Groups of sustainability factors on the firm level (transport is in the empty square)

We like the deduction method and we decided to apply it in indicating factors as well. Thus we developed common sustainability factors and particularly sustainability factors in logistics.

A)   As our research area is defined, we resolved not to go into common factors division and just to define two groups: internal and external factors.

So the distinguised external factors are:

1) legal system including taxes,

2) government investments,

3) target market,

4) private investments,

5) HR,

6) the size of the company,

7) infrastructure of the company,

8) used techs,

9) general management,

10) procurement,

11) type of the product,

12) the market competition and whole state,

13) the X factor.

The internal factors:

1) labour organization,

2) production volumes,

3) transportation,

4) communicational system,

5) capacity,

6) the X factor.

Of course, all these factors can be grouped according to their sphere of activity or initiative. And so the internal factors can be further subdivided.

B)   To describe sustainability in logistics factors we’d like to present you the framework of company’s parts interaction with society, government and biosphere. It’s illustrated below.

Pic.3. Company interaction with customers, government and procurement.

where B stands for biosphere, C – for a company with P (production) and S (storage), G – government, Proc – procurement, TM – target market. So you can notice here different financial, informational and material flows, that are studied by logistics; white arrow symbolizes an impact on the planet made by the enterprise. Logistics is presented on the scheme as a correlation and cooperation of all the flows and their conditions (as, for instance, the position of S).

All processes are cyclical, so there’s no beginning and no end. The system is very fragile, that’s why sustainability in logistics is considered to be essential as it keeps all the parts (including Biosphere) in required balance.

Factors, as it seems to us, are represented by the influence or the activity of all structures in this picture.

In the end, we’ve got the following hierarchy of factors (AFSD – atmosphere friendly for sustainable development):

Table 1. Sustainability indicators, their description and scales of estimation

That’s for the factors. We have identified the correlation between factors and groups of them with the help of SAATI – Analytical Hierarchy Procedure.