INTERVIEW Supplying sustainability RSM US’s David McLaughlin and Paul Duckworth explain the challenges organisations face when looking to make supply chains more sustainable and how cloud technology and RSM can support their efforts BY ALEX SMITH With environmental concerns becoming increasingly pressing, businesses across all industries are facing demands to make their operations more sustainable. One of the most significant barriers to achieving this goal is minimising the impact of their supply chains. While relatively simple in theory, the reality is that such a project requires an enormous amount of effort. First, businesses must calculate the current impact of their supply chain before they can identify how to reduce it, explains David McLaughlin, principal Dynamics 365 industrials leader at consulting services provider RSM US. “On a basic level, a sustainable supply chain is one that uses a sustainable number of resources and has a minimal carbon footprint,” he says. “However, organisations need reliable data to back up any claim of having a sustainable supply chain. To do this, they need to understand the key metrics at each point in the supply chain and benchmark them against a target. You need to have a method to define those metrics and roll them up to an organisational level, and then ideally at a product level. If you don’t measure your processes, you won’t be able to make the right adjustments to drive improvements in sustainability.” Understanding the true impact of their supply chain requires organisations to calculate Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. The latter refers to the emissions that they are indirectly responsible for, such as those produced in making the products it has bought from a supplier, or when its customers use their products. They often make up the largest share of an organisation’s total emissions but can be difficult to evaluate. “It can be wildly complicated to understand an organisation’s Scope 3 emissions, as many of their suppliers will not provide data about their environmental footprints,” says Paul Duckworth, customer experience manager – environment, social and governance speciality at RSM. “Without the existence or availability of that data, it’s very difficult to truly understand an overall footprint. Sometimes, organisations may have to switch to suppliers that provide this data so they can make better decisions in their sustainability efforts.” Collaboration between stakeholders up and down the supply chain is therefore crucial for ensuring sustainability. Among the tools that businesses can use to facilitate this collaboration are cloud-based solutions. “Being in the cloud allows suppliers to proactively feed data to an organisation, enabling it to measure the environmental impact of its supply chain effectively and make the appropriate decisions in response,” says Duckworth. “This is where Microsoft is headed with the Supply Chain Center solution,” adds McLaughlin. “It’s geared around collaboration with suppliers and understanding what’s 130 “ Being in the cloud allows suppliers to proactively feed their data to an organisation” PAUL DUCKWORTH, RSM
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