Partner Article

Greening the supply chain

Tracey Rawling Church, director of Brand & Reputation at KYOCERA Document Solutions UK Ltd, talks about greening the supply chain.

As organisations become more sophisticated in their approach to sustainability, their focus expands from direct product impacts during the use phase, to indirect impacts throughout the supply chain. For KYOCERA, this posed some challenges, due to the way our sales channel is structured. We can be confident about our direct product impacts, as our parent company has an established and robust method for product lifecycle analysis and sustainable manufacturing, as well as a mature sustainable procurement policy that covers the suppliers of raw material.

However things were a great deal more opaque in our UK channel, where the companies which resell our products range from national blue-chips to small, privately-owned businesses operating on a regional basis. Each of these independent businesses has its own culture and values and does not want to be dictated to by a vendor.

In developing a response to this challenge, KYOCERA drew on the expertise of Forum for the Future, which had engaged with trade associations to formulate sustainability strategies flexible enough to support the various challenges of members of different sizes and at different places on the sustainability adoption curve.

As Forum members, KYOCERA has access to excellent best-practice sharing events and the initial idea for the Kyocera Green Partner Programme was a direct result of the insights gained at one of these.

There were several factors that KYOCERA considered:

• The programme needed to respect that fact that some partners had already gained well-respected sustainability accreditations and there was no benefit to either party in putting them through a time-consuming proprietary accreditation process
• Channel partners come in a variety of different sizes and a “one-size fits all” would probably fit none of them
• Some channel partners were totally newcomers to sustainable operation and others were already well advanced.
• The accreditation needed to have enough teeth to make it credible, yet be simple enough to encourage partners to engage

These considerations were reconciled in KYOCERA’s Green Partner Programme, an industry first that launched in February 2010. The programme offers two levels of accreditation: Green Partner and Green Partner Plus, offering an upgrade path for partners beginning their sustainability journey. Those that gain the accreditation can use a logo on their marketing materials and also earn a place on KYOCERA’s green channel partners list, which it recommends to customers whose requirements include a sustainable supply chain. This robust yet flexible approach has been well accepted by both customers and channel partners, and will be modified as sustainable business practice evolves.

For those starting to green a supply chain, do consider these key elements before you begin:

• Prioritisation – target your hotspots first. This will depend on your business but could involve your packaging, your biggest supplier and the impacts your customers most frequently ask about
• Standards – what existing standards could/should you adopt? Don’t reinvent the wheel
• Collaboration – work with your suppliers to define what’s appropriate and relevant for your business. Be clear about targets and sanctions but be prepared to support and assist those that can’t immediately comply
• Proportionality – SMEs will struggle with a 20-page questionnaire and much of it will be irrelevant. Create a ‘lite’ version of your supplier audit to avoid burdening smaller suppliers with unreasonable demands
• Transparency – whatever process you select for monitoring supply chain impacts be prepared to share its details with your stakeholders

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tracey Rawling Church .