Achieving Sustainable Supply Chains: Applying Group Concept Mapping to Prioritize and Implement Sustainable Management Practices

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article explores a developing action plan to establish a new concept for sustainable supply chain management. Overall is acceptable.

The following are some suggestions:

1. Simplify the article title.
2. Add more critical findings in the abstract; currently is too general.
3. Avoid using 'we", 'our' or any other related terms in the texts.
4. Good profile of participants 
5. Due to many terms of variables, please use appropriate acronyms to enhance the reading, or avoid misunderstanding of variables.
6. Value stream mapping is mentioned in the abstract, but no further discussion on the VSM. Please remove or else improve the discussion in the texts. 

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

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Author Response

Please see the attachment.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

1. Sustainable supply chain management and green supply chain management (GSCM) are distinct terms. I recommend that the author(s) choose the terms carefully throughout the paper. For instance, it's important to clarify why "sustainable supply chain" is used in the title while "GSCM" appears in the abstract, introduction, discussion, and conclusion sections. In line 137, it states, "... this study brings a novel approach to better understanding GSCM." Additionally, the research questions presented in lines 170-177 focus exclusively on "environmentally sustainable or green supply chain," rather than the broader concept of sustainable supply chain.

2. Please review the abstract. Reconsider the study's aims to ensure they are accurately reflected in the results and discussion section. It is also essential to clearly state the research aims in the introduction section.

3. Please provide the references for Table 2 (research steps).

4. Elaborate further on the clustering process that leads to the formation of eight clusters (lines 292-297). This step is crucial to the study. Was the process of achieving "group consensus" smooth? Who initiated the clusters? Did the author(s) propose different alternatives? Were there any references cited concerning this process?

5. Review the References section to ensure that the writing format adheres to the journal's guidelines.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for the opportunity to evaluate the manuscript titled “Developing Action Plans for Achieving Sustainable Supply Chains: Applying Group Concept Mapping to Prioritize and Implement Management Practices”.  I would like to congratulate the authors on their study. The authors seek to identify, develop and prioritise a comprehensive, holistic set of concepts and approaches to implementing environmentally and socially sustainable supply chains, based on traditional green supply chain management (GSCM) principles. The authors can be commended for the very detailed description of the coherence of the study, the characterisation of the research methods used, the detailed presentation of the results and the satisfactory quality of the interpretation of them.

While the manuscript is encouraging, the following recommendations are suggested to improve the article:

1) The abstract does not highlight the relevance of the topic or explain why it is important. Additionally, it would be beneficial to include more specific research results obtained by the authors.

2) It is recommended to put more effort into preparing the introduction, presenting more convincing arguments why developing action plans for achieving sustainable supply chains is so important, and to highlight more sustainable management practices analyzed in recent literature that would clearly correlate with the research results. The introduction could emphasize the Lean concept less, especially since it is not mentioned later in the article.  Moreover, the text is sometimes confusing and it is not always easy to follow the authors' thoughts, there are jumps of thought. For example, in Lines 32-34 the authors write  ”These definitions define the…”, but do not provide any definitions before that. Also, in line 43, they write “…these techniques…”, which are not explained.

3) The authors could provide more detail in the Materials and Methods section on how the participants were searched and how the interviews were conducted.

4) Although in the discussion section the authors try to compare their results with those of other authors, the value of this part of the paper would be much greater if the discussion were developed on the basis of more recent results from other researchers. Currently, the results are dominated by results that are 10 years old, which, in a dynamic environment, may not fully reflect the present-day relevance and may not highlight similarities or differences.

5) Although the authors state that they developed hypotheses (lines 15, 45–46), these are not highlighted in the article. Only one hypothesis is mentioned, and that is in just one place (line 537).

6) Check Line 31 - the word “manufacturing” is repeated several times. The quality of Figures 3-4 could be better as the image is not sharp.

7) Authors should follow the requirements of the journal template more closely, i.e., reviewing the requirements for in-text citation of authors as well as the requirements for the reference list.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf