Sustainable Supply Chain

Hi I am Pranav Surendran of ASB Coimbatore. Recently, I came across an article related to sustainable supply chain.

 With a record number of shareholder resolutions on supply chains released over the past two proxy seasons, stakeholder pressure from investors , lenders, consumers and non-profits to push sustainability into the supply chain has dramatically increased in recent years.

Companies can save energy , improve processes, discover product technologies, save money , increase efficiency by managing and enhancing environmental , social and economic performance through supply chains and promote corporate values. Research shows the business case for sustainability of the supply chain is rising It is difficult to integrate sustainability into the supply chain of a business, but failure to act can be the greatest risk of all. Companies can take several initial steps to move toward sustainable supply chain:

Map your supply chain   

Many businesses do not have a detailed understanding of the influence of their supply chain on sustainability. An early phase is to classify inventory vendors, classify the most critical environmental and social issues they have, and prioritize supplier efforts.

Communicate expectations

A perfect way to express corporate values and culture to the suppliers and consumers is to concentrate on sustainability across the supply chain. A critical step in involving suppliers in your sustainability efforts is establishing and communicating expectations through a supplier code of conduct.

Baseline supplier performance 

When you know who your target suppliers are and have set compliance criteria, you can get an understanding of your starting point by gathering data from suppliers through a simple benchmarking questionnaire or self-assessment.

Several businesses, such as supermarkets, big labels and the U.S. The Federal Government, through questionnaires and surveys, has begun assessing the efficiency of its suppliers.

Increasingly, organizations incorporate all areas included in their code of conduct with special focus and weight in the self-assessments related to areas that are important to their business.

Communicating back to suppliers in a constructive way is critical for future engagement and provides encouragement for improvement.

Develop training and capacity building programs

This is an important step in the supply chain in enhancing sustainability and driving behavioural improvements. In support of these activities, many external services are available and some are customized to particular sector needs.

At annual vendor conferences, through online training programmes and through capacity building campaigns, one successful way to move expertise across the supply chain is to leverage the best practices and case studies from high performing suppliers.

Drive performance improvement

Once the baseline performance of the supplier is known, an audit programme will calculate changes in performance over time. Although in many situations, a corporate group, such as EHS, procurement or marketing, completes the self-assessments, on-site audits may expose local processes, behavioural issues and realistic opportunities for change that are difficult to define through questionnaires alone.

Join industry collaboration

Many businesses realize that individual efforts can not overcome complex supply chain problems and that industry-wide cooperation is necessary. Working in a pre-competitive setting, peer companies sharing similar supply chains will set common sustainability performance standards and best practices and allow suppliers to be judged on the same metrics. A perfect way to exchange information about the sustainable output of your suppliers is to work with your industry peers.