How greentech is improving supply chain sustainability

How­ev­er hard a busi­ness tries to become more sus­tain­able, its efforts will have lit­tle impact if these don’t involve its sup­pli­ers. For­tu­nate­ly, sev­er­al new green­tech enter­pris­es are address­ing this need, offer­ing hi-tech solu­tions address­ing all aspects of sus­tain­abil­i­ty through­out the sup­ply chain.

Dan Yates is the co-founder and CEO of Green­er, a start-up that’s build­ing a net­work­ing plat­form to help SMEs in the food and drink indus­try find part­ners with shared val­ues con­cern­ing sus­tain­abil­i­ty. He believes that, while glob­al sup­ply chains are intri­cate­ly con­nect­ed, there are still huge dis­con­nects when it comes to sus­tain­abil­i­ty – which is why inno­va­tion is key. 

“Inno­va­tion is about build­ing sus­tain­abil­i­ty into deci­sion-mak­ing from the get-go,” Yates says. “It will always be hard­er to retroac­tive­ly fit sus­tain­abil­i­ty into estab­lished process­es than it is to build thought­ful oper­a­tions from the start.”

What are some of the greatest challenges?

One of the biggest obsta­cles, espe­cial­ly when retro­fitting, is iner­tia, he says. Large busi­ness­es face iner­tia of scale, which applies when they try to change well-estab­lished work­ing meth­ods. Small­er busi­ness­es, which often lack the resources that would enable them to ful­ly embrace sus­tain­abil­i­ty, face invest­ment iner­tia. For Yates, advanced tech such as big-data ana­lyt­ics has the poten­tial to offer effec­tive solu­tions. 

“Its abil­i­ty to explore and process huge amounts of com­plex data very quick­ly and trans­late this into mean­ing­ful action will be so rel­e­vant,” he says. “Many busi­ness­es, par­tic­u­lar­ly SMEs, still depend on word of mouth to find part­ners – a sys­tem that’s exist­ed since the dawn of com­merce. Tech­nol­o­gy has the poten­tial to ele­vate this exchange. What­ev­er you think of the out­come, it’s unde­ni­able that social media plat­forms have reimag­ined how we con­nect with each oth­er. We need a rev­o­lu­tion on that scale in the way that busi­ness­es com­mu­ni­cate to engage mean­ing­ful­ly with sus­tain­abil­i­ty.”

Tackling carbon emissions in the supply chain

Reduc­ing an organisation’s CO₂ emis­sions is a sus­tain­abil­i­ty imper­a­tive that needs to involve every part of the busi­ness. So says Mau­ro Cozzi, co-founder and CEO of Emit­wise, a provider of soft­ware that enables firms to mon­i­tor their car­bon foot­prints in real time.

“To decar­bonise a busi­ness, it’s vital to ful­ly under­stand the cli­mate foot­print and the asso­ci­at­ed risks of the company’s entire set of activ­i­ties. This knowl­edge will guide actions to min­imise its envi­ron­men­tal impacts,” he says. “But the largest and hard­est-to-reach area is the sup­ply chain. Its emis­sions are extreme­ly com­plex and lie beyond the con­trol of most com­pa­nies, while the accu­ra­cy of report­ing can vary wide­ly among sup­pli­ers.”

Cozzi con­tin­ues: “The clear­est, most sin­cere com­mit­ment to decar­bon­i­sa­tion is the set­ting of a sci­ence-based tar­get. This will guide the extent and speed of emis­sion reduc­tions along the val­ue chain to con­strain glob­al warm­ing to 1.5ºC [above its pre-indus­tri­al lev­el].”

While the lat­est tech­nol­o­gy can han­dle large swathes of data, it’s only as valu­able as the infor­ma­tion it can process. This requires enter­pris­es to be com­plete­ly open about the full extent of their car­bon foot­prints, he says, adding: “The most effec­tive car­bon account­ing, super­charged by machine learn­ing, can absorb the vast com­plex­i­ty of a glob­al val­ue chain, apply algo­rithms to analyse data, learn from it and make pre­dic­tions that cre­ate real impact.”

When Spendesk, a provider of expens­es-man­age­ment soft­ware, want­ed to reduce its car­bon foot­print, it first asked Emit­wise to apply its AI-dri­ven mon­i­tor­ing sys­tem to obtain a true pic­ture of the firm’s green­house gas emis­sions. This has giv­en the busi­ness a sol­id start­ing point on which to base its efforts, tak­ing a lot of guess­work out of the process. 

“We now know which aspects of com­pa­ny life con­tribute to our car­bon foot­print, so we can make tar­get­ed plans to fix these,” says Spendesk’s inbound mar­ket­ing man­ag­er, Juli­ette Hervé.

The firm also ben­e­fit­ed from hav­ing a clear view of its sup­pli­ers’ activ­i­ties, which is some­thing that may not be avail­able to all busi­ness­es. “Spendesk is a spe­cial­ist in track­ing cor­po­rate spend­ing, so we’re par­tic­u­lar­ly aware of our own activ­i­ties in this area – whom we pay reg­u­lar­ly and for what,” Hervé says.

This facil­i­ty revealed how much was being spent on small pur­chas­es around the organ­i­sa­tion. “These add up on the com­pa­ny card, but also on our car­bon foot­print,” she says. “With­out a com­plete overview of our sup­pli­er spend­ing, there’s no way that we could have known this.”

Last-mile innovation

When look­ing to improve sus­tain­abil­i­ty through­out the val­ue chain, a com­pa­ny needs to ensure that both its inter­nal func­tions and its exter­nal part­ners can offer a clear view of the emis­sions with­in their con­trol, says Ronit Eli­av, vice-pres­i­dent of brand and prod­uct mar­ket­ing at Bringg, a green deliv­ery and ful­fil­ment spe­cial­ist.

“This data needs to be con­veyed to the con­sumer as well as the organ­i­sa­tion, so that every­one is equipped to make the right choic­es about green deliv­er­ies,” she argues. 

Here, inno­va­tion through tech­nol­o­gy can sup­port sus­tain­abil­i­ty in many ways. A last-mile deliv­ery and ful­fil­ment solu­tion, for instance, can apply vehi­cle-load opti­mi­sa­tion and fuel-effi­cient rout­ing to sup­port the deliv­ery of goods on a con­nect­ed fleet of elec­tric vehi­cles to reduce car­bon emis­sions.

Dig­i­tal­ly trans­form­ing the sup­ply chain can help com­pa­nies to inte­grate their finan­cial and envi­ron­men­tal prac­tices all along it, notes Eli­av, who adds: “From devel­op­ment through pro­duc­tion to deliv­ery, organ­i­sa­tions can focus on cre­at­ing effi­cien­cies for sus­tain­able ini­tia­tives such as the reduc­tion of waste and car­bon emis­sions.”