What is your advice on how to successfully implement sustainability and circular supply chains? What are the challenges and what steps to approach them?
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no title2 years ago
You brought up interesting points and insights. Thank you for sharing Zsofia Nagy.<br><br>On the other side, I find executives wanted to see the supply chain sustainability implementation and results but struggled to get the team to move forward, lacking resources and budget, and people are feeling like they already have enough in their roles to keep the daily operations running.<br><br>I agree, it takes time, vision, commitment, teamwork, innovative thinking, how-to strategy, and good planning to execute them before seeing the desired states and results for sure.<br><br>Good discussion. Have a great day.<br>
This is again a super broad question, but what works in every business are the following:
1. education at all levels of the organisation
2. transparency on where we are
3. mental openness and commitment to the change by the leadership in the first place
I know these sound as a standard consulting advice, but these are the key pillars of every change, no matter what topic we discuss. These are equally the same areas of challenges that I see every day in my work (lack of education, transparency and commitment).
Beyond these, it is very much dependent on the individual company to assess how much they can change their business model to become sustainable or even circular if possible.
In some cases, it is easier, in other cases it is a huge change.
As an example, I recently evaluated a company with their sustainability team and they agreed to change from a sales only model to rental model of one of their produced consumer goods range (durable devices - as one can imagine).
We evaluated the full impact (both on manufacturing as well as what other functions they needed) and it came out on par for cost/margin with what they had done so far (it needed a new pricing model as well of course). So they give it a shot, which I'm happy to see.
I'd recommend following free LinkedIn sources and/or other courses (edX or Coursera both are fine), where one can start the learning process in the first place and don't forget to take action as soon as you see a point you can change, no matter how small.
My go to strategy at getting leadership to buy-in is basically weave in sustainable options into standard supply chain business cases and if it requires a business model change, then give a full view of the possibilities vs the existing ones. That usually gives me a good idea if the leadership is open to change or not.