Dhanushi Rodrigo
Dhanushi is currently pursuing her PhD at Atlantic Technological University (ATU) Galway City researching the phenomena of sustainability learning in the context of supply chains. She is an MBA graduate and a qualified Chartered Management Accountant holding associate membership of Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA, UK). Possessing over 6 years of industry experience in both sustainability and supply chain fields, she has recognized the crucial importance and heightened pressures to trickle down sustainability throughout the supply chain. Although any given firm can eventually do much to enhance sustainability, the high level of interconnection in global supply networks may render such isolated efforts ineffective, thereby rending it imperative to understand network-level process. It is this passion to identify collaborative efforts towards supply chain sustainability which fuels her research interest.
The world today is characterised by heightened pressures for sustainability due to increasing stakeholder interest and regulatory actions. Together with increased interdependence amongst partner companies, there is a need to identify mechanisms by which sustainability can be furthered throughout the supply chain. This also implies the transformation of an organisation’s traditional supply chain management into sustainable supply chain management, which requires supply chain partners to learn sustainability-related knowledge.
Extant literature has emphasised the role of learning within supply chains, as the partner companies engage in information sharing, knowledge gathering and development for learning and innovation. These learning processes take place because supply chain players have to develop new capabilities and learn together to address environmental challenges and facilitate cooperation and collaboration. Supply chain sustainability learning (‘SCSL’) as defined by Cormack et al in 2021 in essence refers to 'ensuring that the focal company, and it's suppliers and customers, are actively and simultaneously managing the learning process aimed at specific sustainability issues'.
Stemming from the fact that SCSL plays a profound role in supply chain sustainability, the project aims to identify the enablers and barriers which would instigate supply chain sustainability learning in a supply chain context. The project then aims to unlock processes, structures, and mechanisms to stimulate collective learning orientation of a supply chain thereby generating insights for supply chain managers on trickling down the sustainability lessons learnt to the wider supply chain context and thereby generate positive outcomes in terms of economic, environment and social performance of supply chains.