Proximity manufacturing for enhancing clothing supply chain sustainability

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJLM-09-2017-0233
• Pages: 1346-1378
• Published date: 05 June 2018
• Date: 05 June 2018
• Author: Petchprakai Sirilertsuwan,Daniel Ekwall,Daniel Hjelmgren
• Subject Matter: Logistics,Management science & operations

Proximity manufacturing for

enhancing clothing supply chain

sustainability

Petchprakai Sirilertsuwan

University of Borås, Borås, Sweden;

ENSAIT/GEMTEX, Roubaix, France;

Soochow University, Suzhou, China and

University of Lille 1, Lille, France

Daniel Ekwall

University of Borås, Borås, Sweden and

Hanken School of Economic, Helsinki, Finland, and

Daniel Hjelmgren

University of Borås, Borås, Sweden

Abstract

Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to reveal benefits and factors (elements) of proximity manufacturing

that enhance triple bottom line (TBL) sustainability in the clothing industry and discusses previous proximity

manufacturing studies.

Design/methodology/approach –A systematic review is used in searching and extracting data (primary

studies artifacts and proximity manufacturing elements) from peer-reviewed articles. Extracted elements are

gathered and analyzed in constructed tables under TBL. Four subgroups are inducted under the business

bottom line.

Findings –This paper shows the potential of proximity manufacturing to enhance TBL sustainability, the

scope of proximity manufacturing, and the trend and absence of existing studies. The most frequently

mentioned elements are time-to-market, job creation, product quality, quick response, and trade policies.

Governments and clusters are also important players.

Research limitations/implications –Future research can further explore elements potentially improving

TBL sustainability to fill gaps in existing studies, including how proximity manufacturing can drive environmental

and social practices, and how governments can encourage proximity manufacturing in various markets.

Practical implications –Besides perceiving the benefits of proximity manufacturing, businesses may use

the derived elements to make manufacturing decisions.

Social implications –Public policies giving privileges to the locally produced garment industry have great

potential to drive the economy and employment as well as sustain local clothing knowledge and the environment.

Originality/value –Proximity manufacturing strategies toward sustainability are under-researched

academically and under-practiced industrially; this paper provides insight into sustainability benefits of

proximity manufacturing.

Keywords Sustainability, Process management, Literature review, Europe, Asia, North America,

Sourcing and supply, Supply chain innovation, Supplier management, Offshoring-reshoring

Paper type Literature review

1. Introduction

The clothing industry, as well as other labor-intensive industries, has over the last

few decades been focused on a factory-on-wheels strategy (Collett and Spicer, 1995;

Dicken, 2011) to minimize the total cost of production (Burt, 2003), utilizing low-cost labor

as well as government-given benefits such as tax cuts, subsidiaries, and business-friendly

The International Journal of

Logistics Management

Vol. 29 No. 4, 2018

pp. 1346-1378

© Emerald PublishingLimited

0957-4093

DOI 10.1108/IJLM-09-2017-0233

Received 12 September 2017

Revised 15 February 2018

Accepted 29 March 2018

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

www.emeraldinsight.com/0957-4093.htm

An earlier version of this work was presented at NOFOMA conference in 2017. This work is a part of

the project under the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Programme, “Sustainable Management and

Design for Textiles”(SMDTex), which is financed by the European Commission.

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legislation (Dicken, 2011). This practice is now challenged, as “taking home

manufacturing,”or reshoring, is a new trend in production (Ellram et al., 2013).

Several reasons are stated for the trend change, including the rising cost of labor

in low-cost countries (Ellram et al., 2013), longer shipping times (Bradley, 2005), and the

desire to produce closer to the end-customer’s location (Kärkkäinen et al., 2003). This is

also shown by the current trend of adopting sustainable supply chain management

(SSCM) practices, focusing on environmental and social dimensions, including

corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects. However, clothing industry companies

rarely adopt proximity manufacturing within their sustainability practices (Turker and

Altuntas, 2014).

Many proximity manufacturing or sourcing strategies studies have focused only on the

business/economic dimensions of coping with demand uncertainty or finding optimal

sourcing options between local and global manufacturing since the 1990s (Forney et al.,

1990; Christerson and Appelbaum, 1995; Guercini and Runfola, 2004; Barnes and Lea-

Greenwood, 2006; Martin et al., 2006; Dana et al., 2007; Macchion et al., 2015). These studies

failed to explore proximity manufacturing for improving sustainability in the clothing

industry, particularly in enhancing economic, environmental, and social dimensions of the

triple bottom line (TBL). Most SSCM studies also ignored to consider all TBL dimensions as

well as the relationship between proximity manufacturing and sustainability shown in some

literature review studies on SSCM (Seuring and Müller, 2008; Ahi and Searcy, 2013;

Rameshwar et al., 2017). Therefore, the first gap regards the lack of attention in both

academic and industrial fields on implementing proximity manufacturing in the clothing

industry to enhance TBL sustainability.

Recently, a few researchers (Desai et al., 2012; Gardetti and Torres, 2013; Shen, 2014;

Ashby, 2016) have studied proximity manufacturing in the clothing industry, covering all

dimensions of TBL sustainability. However, these studies provide little evidence to justify

the claim that proximity manufacturing can enhance TBL sustainability, which is the

second gap. Furthermore, there are few literature reviews regarding sustainability in

clothing supply chains such as a recent literature review by Yang et al. (2017) regarding

sustainable retailing in the clothing industry. Yang et al. (2017) focused on disposable

fashion, green branding, secondhand-fashion retailing, reverse logistics, and e-commerce

opportunities while this paper explored close proximity between manufacturing point and

consumption point as a way to enhance TBL sustainability.

Therefore, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview on proximity

manufacturing benefits for each dimension of TBL sustainability and presents a literature

review of existing studies linking proximity manufacturing with sustainability in clothing

supply chains.

This paper presents two research questions (RQs), shown below:

RQ1. What are the most frequently mentioned benefits and factors of proximity

manufacturing in the clothing industry under each dimension of TBL

sustainability presented in existing literature? RQ1 will reveal both common and

different frequently mentioned benefits among various markets/contexts.

RQ2. How has proximity manufacturing in relation to the TBL dimensions of

sustainability been studied (research methods and data sources, studied markets

and production locations, and TBL dimensions included)? RQ2 will reveal trends

and absences in existing studies.

The contributions of this paper are thr eefold. First, it integrates the proximity

manufacturing perspective into the TBL concept, providing the potential to enhance

clothing supply chain sustainability through manufacturing locally. Second, this paper

explores how proximity manufacturing benefits each TBL dimension, leading practitioners

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clothing

supply chain

sustainability

and policy makers to support proximity manufacturing for sustainability. Third, the

findings of this paper help identify research gaps from the literature, providing an agenda to

future researchers.

2. Overview of TBL concept and practices for sustainability in the clothing

industry

In addition to SSCM research (Seuring and Müller, 2008; Li et al., 2014; Turker and Altuntas,

2014; Khurana and Ricchetti, 2016), the TBL framework is widely used in company reports

aligned with the Global Reporting Initiative; thus, the framework can influence corporate

operations, investments, and strategies. In this paper, the TBL concept is used as a tool for

classifying the extracted data from existing studies into each TBL dimension to examine

how proximity manufacturing benefits and drives sustainability in the dimensions.

To achieve sustainability, corporations must pay attention to the entire product life cycle

because environmental problems may occur at suppliers’sites and pass through the supply

chain (Elkington, 1994). Therefore, this paper examines the factors included in previous

scientific literature related to proximity manufacturing within the clothing industry’s entire

supply chain, from resources and suppliers to transportation and sales markets.

The TBL concept is used in sustainable development and corporate sustainability

in the context of environmental, social, and economic performance (Elkington, 1998).

The environmental dimension involves ecosystems’life expectancies and natural resource

consumption, encompassing concerns of global warming, water pollution, and garment

disposal at the end of its life. The social dimension involves societies, cultures, and

communities, as well as the health of workers and consumers, human rights, labor

standards, working conditions, and contaminated or chemical-toxic products (Khurana and

Ricchetti, 2016). The economic, or business, dimension involves competition and corporation

survival under governance, financial, and market contexts (Elkington, 2010). Sustainability

positively affects a company’s economic bottom line, shielding brand value from reputation

risks as well as differentiating brands from the competition (Khurana and Ricchetti, 2016).

In this paper, the economic dimension is referred to as the business dimension, which

is unique to the clothing business, and the nation’s economy is classified under the

social dimension.

In the clothing industry, common environmental practices for achieving sustainability

include organic-fiber usage, material recycling or reuse, technology implementation

(including clean technology and information technology), product certificates, green

processes and product design, green manufacturing and logistics, and product traceability

(Caniato et al., 2012; Shen, 2014). Fair-trade labeling, code of conduct initiatives, internal and

social auditing, and looking beyond first-tier suppliers are attempts to improve

sustainability within the social dimension (Khurana and Ricchetti, 2016). CSR programs

are implemented in firms to improve the living standard of workers and their families as

well as contribute to local communities and the economy. CSR implementation can provide

return benefits through positive brand reputation and improved financial performance

(Wu et al., 2015), which drives sustainability within the business dimension.

3. Methodology

Although several studies have shown the benefits of proximity manufacturing in general,

there has been little focus on environmental and social dimensions or attempts to

systematically gather and organize the benefits and factors of proximity manufacturing into

a comprehensive review. This paper therefore conducts a systematic literature review (SLR),

which generates rigorous and replicable data to create a comprehensive review of unfulfilled

knowledge, following the same approach and reasoning for using the SLR as many studies

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