Sustainable Fashion Supply Chain Management: A System of Systems Analysis

The system of systems (SoS) theory is an important topic in modern systems engineering management. Previous studies focus mainly on using it to explore large-scale physical systems. Relatively little is known about its applications in business operations. In this paper, through the SoS theory, we explore sustainable fashion supply chain management via a multimethodological approach. To be specific, we first investigate and indicate that the fashion supply chain is a well-qualified SoS. We then propose the critical SoS principles for building a sustainable fashion supply chain. We analytically reveal and investigate the values of these principles by deriving the “expected value of SoS principles” (EVSOS). In particular, we highlight how the number of market observations as well as the fabric and product leftovers related loss and gain affect EVSOS. We further build a two-stage framework as well as an action matrix for achieving sustainable fashion supply chain management. Finally, a public-data based real case study on Sweden giant fashion enterprise H&M is conducted to illustrate real world applications of the proposed framework.