Establishing a Competitive Advantage through Sustainable SCM

Experience has shown that companies typically target immediate return from their procurement investment. However, today’s better known and leading supply chain focused organizations now seek enhance ROI from the sustainable supply chain ‘value’ conversation. One key to realizing the value from this business sustainability strategy is aligned and enable resources.

“To ensure staff has enough time to work on higher value projects, leading procurement organizations regularly and transparently assess the relative value of their activity mix and reprioritize accordingly. –Procurement Strategy Council”

Defined by an ability to immediately determine risk and mitigate supply disruptions before they occur, sustainable supply chain leaders are creating strategic business sustainability advantage. Several questions which our sustainability consulting explore with executives in making a step-change include:

Do You Do it Differently?
Do You Have Metrics that Make a Difference?
Do You Invent?
Do Your Customers Agree?

Building upon this thought process, the Spend Management post, Achieving Competitive Advantage through Procurement, discusses the value-adding procurement activities. Differentiating between transactional and strategic functions, leading sustainable supply chain organizations seek to enable their resources with aligned incentives and authority to implement business sustainability solutions.

Within our sustainability consulting practice, we have encountered a wide variety of sustainable supply chainactions aimed at adding visibility and focusing attention on supply chain stakeholders. We have found one common characteristic amongst these sustainable organizations is the ability to effectively manage the flow of information across the supply chain. In fact, the true ‘business sustainability’ differentiators are those who enable their internal resources to effectively engage with their external stakeholders.