The Green Way To Streamline Supply Chains

Streamlining the corporate supply chain and having greater visibility into its operations are crucial for today’s conglomerates to manage spending and resources and make their business more efficient.

But a new venture by food giant Cargill and financial advisor firm PricewaterhouseCoopers provides companies with a way to reap the benefits of a more efficient supply chain while ensuring that its operations are environmentally sustainable.

Cargill and PwC announced Monday (June 22) that they are launching their Responsible Supply Chain advisory service, a tool that provides companies with support to reduce supply chain risk and meet regulatory requirements for sustainability and social well-being.

The venture will offer businesses various marketing, finance and procurement training sessions and will ask client companies to implement up to two hours of preparation before those sessions. Altogether, the process will seek to provide businesses with a set of quick solutions to improve their supply chain efficiencies, transparency and innovation.

According to Cargill Senior Director of Sustainability Steve Polski, implementing an array of specialized teams is crucial to the success of the program as it increases communication throughout all aspects of the supply chain. For example, Polski said, one corporate client faced a high number of cancelled truck orders without knowledge.

“It was as simple as there wasn’t that direct communication,” the executive said. “It was a sustainability opportunity relative to transportation, diesel, methyl bromide and process inefficiency.” While providing a solution to this particular problem reduced CO2 emissions, it also saved the business customer money and time.

According to reports from GreenBiz, the collaboration is a rare show of sustainability efforts in the B2B sector. The companies have reportedly maintained close ties for years, making the new supply chain management tool an effort from two already intertwined businesses.

“It was a way to harmonize and standardize their approach to managing environmental/social risks in their supply chains and be able to have a process where they could look their customer in the eye and say, ‘We’ve got this fantastic process in place where you can be assured that we’ve got your back, and we’re taking care of the environmental associate issues upstream in the supply chain,’” PwC Sustainable Business Solutions Director Cope Willis told GreenBiz in a recent interview.