Towards Collecting Sustainability Data in Supply Chains with Flexible Data Collection Processes

Nowadays, OEMs from many domains (e.g., electronics and automotive) face rising pressure from customers and legal regulations to produce more sustainable products. This involves the reporting and publishing of various sustainability indicators. However, the demands of legal entities and customers constitute a tremendous challenge as products in these domains comprise various components and sub-components provided by suppliers. Hence, sustainability data collection must be executed along the entire supply chain. In turn, this involves a myriad of different automated and manual tasks as well as quickly changing situations. In combination with potentially long-running processes, these issues result in great process variability that cannot be predicted at design time. In the SustainHub project, a dedicated information system for supporting data collection processes is developed. This paper provides three contributions: (1) it identifies core challenges for sustainable supply chain communication, (2) it reviews state-of-the-art technical solutions for such challenges, and (3) it gives a first overview of the approach we are developing in the SustainHub project to address the challenges. By achieving that, this comprehensive approach has the potential to unify and simplify supply chain communication in the future.