What are some things supply chain members could do to improve sustainability?

While there’s no quick and easy “fix” when it comes to integrating sustainability into the supply chain, by making the appropriate changes bit by bit, your organization can achieve a bottom line characterized not only by profit but by people and the planet. The following four tips will help you on your journey to make your supply chain more sustainable for the future.

1. Map out Your Supply Chain

Without a comprehensive understanding of your supply chain, it’s unlikely you’ll even be able to start implementing effective sustainability changes. After all, how can you identify necessary changes if you don’t have a visual understanding of what they all are?

As a result, the first step toward sustainability requires you to map out your entire supply chain. This will allow you to determine risks and waste-drivers while giving you an accurate representation of the social, economic and environmental challenges faced by global suppliers. You’ll then be able to see how both human and natural resources are used across every stage of the operational and production process, showing you where changes can be made.

2. Ensure Ethical Sourcing

As a supply chain manager, you must be able to see how your suppliers are producing and extracting raw materials to ensure they are following sustainability guidelines. This focus on raw materials is exceptionally important in supply chains. Although you can’t predict the effects of climate change, the countries from which these materials are extracted are likely to be impacted. This is a wider issue that will require a long-term strategy, but there are smaller actions you can take to introduce sustainability into your company.

For example, changing your pallet vendor and opting for a local supplier not only will reduce transportation times and the likely costs associated with this, but also any carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions related to travel will be lowered as well. On a smaller scale, simple hacks such as going completely paperless by using a digital means of communication and paperwork will help you do your part in caring for the planet.

3. Change Your Mentality

A significant contributing factor to slow (and in some cases, lack of) progress in the move toward sustainability remains education. While some measures to sustainability require physical procedural changes, this generally won’t happen unless behavioral and cultural changes are implemented first. As such, a crucial step to achieving supply chain sustainability is earning the respect and understanding of your staff and suppliers.

By developing internal training programs that instill the importance of your mission to both existing and new employees, you’ll see everyone become aligned with the same goal, helping you strive toward a communal result day in and day out. To do this, showcase success stories, use facts to build momentum within your organization and have your team come up with their own ideas for how to integrate sustainable practices within more specialized business operations.

4. Collaborate with Other Companies

No matter how hard you try, individuals can’t solve complicated supply chain issues alone, whether they be at a company level or on a more personal level. However, what you can do is become a voice for change and spread this message to competitors who operate in similar parts of the supply chain as you do, encouraging them to collaborate on efforts to develop sustainable practices that inevitably will benefit you all.

While working with your closest competitors might initially appear to be a foreign concept, these types of collaborations will allow you to set a common standard to which your suppliers can be held accountable, preventing mountains of paperwork and enabling you to make an impact on the future of the industry as a whole.

Consumer demand has pushed environmental concerns to the forefront of the global business agenda, ultimately making a sustainable approach to how supply chains operate the only choice for sustaining an organization’s longevity. The greatest risk is to do nothing. By taking note of these four tips, you should be more prepared and encouraged to start your sustainability plan this year.

The sustainable supply chain has become a vital – and ever more visible – element of social corporate responsibility.

Fueled by consumer demands, increasing regulations and a mounting business case, steering supply chains in a more sustainable direction has grown from laudable ambition to requisite for long-term preservation.

A sustainable supply chain is about far more than the environment, though that’s where consumers might focus their attention. Sustainability is a confluence of social, ecological and economic environments. A sustainable supply chain must avoid compromising both the environment and the business itself.

It’s also important to recognise that a “responsible” supply chain isn’t necessarily the same thing as a “sustainable” supply chain. A responsible supply chain typically ensures it operates within all legal and ethical parameters. This doesn’t affirm sustainability, however. A sustainable supply chain takes into account environmental and societal reference points. The sustainable chain requires that all partners consider how their processes and actions can be supported by nature and society over the long term.

There’s no quick and easy path to sustainability, but the right supply chain solutions can help your business strive toward, and eventually achieve, a bottom line defined by not just profit but also by people and the planet.

Create a detailed map

Little, if nothing, can be accomplished within your supply chain if you don’t have useful visibility of it. Shockingly few companies actually have detailed views of their entire supply chains, which are more complex and global than ever. Mapping your entire supply chain is the starting point. A quality map of your supply chain will allow you to identify impacts, risks and drivers of waste.

This “aerial” view of the chain can help you understand environmental, economic and social challenges faced by suppliers. These can be extremely variable based on your industry, but a thorough map of the chain accounts for how human and natural resources are used along each step of operational and production process.

Educate and change the culture

Some measures to sustainability require not only procedural changes, but behavioral and cultural changes. An important step to achieving sustainability is earning buy-in from your own staff and that of suppliers. Education and training resources can help align everyone with the mission. Showcase success stories and leverage successful case studies to build momentum within your organisation and throughout the chain. Develop training programs that instill the mission from the time new employees are onboarded.

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Encourage and assist upstream

Sustainability can’t be accomplished unilaterally. You’ll need support and co-operation all the way back upstream. Though you may not have the kind of persuasive power over your chain like a Walmart or Amazon, you do have the ability to influence supplier practices. Performing audits and/or enacting codes of conduct can encourage suppliers to promote your sustainability efforts.

Furthermore, be willing to assist them when possible. Helping them with best practices design and implementation advances your sustainability efforts while furthering the overall goals. It might be necessary to apply pressure in some instances, but don’t be afraid to do so if the ultimate objectives are important to you.

Leverage technology

Technology has taken supply chain management from art to science. Continued advances in technology are providing organisations with once-unconceivable abilities to analyze, tweak, measure and optimise operational processes like inventory management, order and distribution management and transportation management. Insights gained through data and machine learning can be leveraged to find and exploit opportunities for sustainable processes.

Collaborate

Individual efforts don’t solve complex supply chain issues, at a personal level or even a company level. Many competing companies share portions of supply chains, and collaborating on efforts to develop and establish sustainable practices can benefit all. While it may feel counterintuitive to work with rivals, combining efforts on sustainability practices not only advances the objectives, but offers an opportunity for positive public perception and to build credibility with industry and consumers.

Build on success

You track financial objectives, such as revenue and profit, of course. It’s said you can’t improve what you can’t measure, so develop sustainability objectives and track their successes. Then, build on these successes and use them as springboards to further your efforts.

The road to sustainability can’t be accomplished overnight, and it won’t be done with shortsighted or apathetic efforts. It might also require initial investment to facilitate the necessary procedural and cultural changes. By starting your efforts now and building on each small success, innovation will breed throughout the process and strengthen the business case to work in conjunction with the social case.

Consumer demands and changing regulations have pushed environmental concerns into the discussion for businesses across the globe. Ultimately, a sustainable approach to supply chains will be the only viable choice for any company’s long-term success.

For more information on all topics for Procurement, Supply Chain & Logistics - please take a look at the latest edition of Supply Chain Digital magazine.

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