by Brianna Crandall — February 8, 2015—The Global Environmental Management Initiative (GEMI) recently announced the availability of a “first-of-its-kind” Supply Chain Sustainability (SCS) Tool, designed to produce a portfolio view of the sustainability of a company’s supply chain in order to help with compliance, reporting and best practices.
“This new GEMI supply chain sustainability tool was developed through a collaborative process by the GEMI Supply Chain Sustainability (SCS) Work Group, the University of Minnesota Northstar Initiative for Sustainable Enterprise (NiSE), and Climate Earth,” commented Bill Gill, assistant vice president, Environmental Affairs, Smithfield Foods and the Chair of GEMI as well as GEMI’s SCS Work Group. “The SCS tool has been designed as a guide to help support and assist with strategic sourcing and procurement by providing visibility into CO2e and water impacts within a financial context. We believe it is the first tool to offer a portfolio view of the supply chain, enabling tradeoffs between impacts and across purchase categories. The first three product categories for this tool are paperboard container manufacturing, plastic film and sheet manufacturing, and soap and cleaning compound manufacturing, and there is clearly an opportunity to expand that list.”
“This first-of-its-kind browser-based tool allows a user to enter spending across purchase categories. SCS then calculates CO2e and water impacts and assesses alternative purchasing scenarios for each of the three featured categories,” said Dr. Timothy Smith, associate professor, University of Minnesota, who co-led tool development and created the underlying science based models informing the tool. “Although many have talked about the need for organizations to coordinate environmental improvement opportunities across sourced inputs, this is the first time that a user-based system has been developed to move the discussion into action.”
“We are excited about this new tool because it will allow an organization to estimate results of multiple scenarios or combinations of scenarios, helping companies engage and focus on their supply chains and design more sustainable strategies,” added Steve Hellem, GEMI’s executive director. “Our GEMI members recognize that a great deal of consumptive impacts of key environmental challenges such as CO2e and water are tied up within complex value chains. Given a wide range of opportunities, the SCS tool can quickly quantify multiple scenarios, a key step in moving forward with a better understanding of options that procurement professionals have at their disposal to make business decisions that provide value to their organizations while at the same time improving the environment.”
Chris Erickson, CEO of Climate Earth and the creator of the platform for the SCS Tool, concluded, “Climate Earth is pleased to be part of this new, innovative and first-of-its-kind tool. The platform has been designed to be a simple, scalable, open and interactive tool for procurement and supply chain managers to help them better understand priorities and measure performance of sourcing strategies.”
GEMI SCS Work Group Project Supporters included: 3M; Anderson, Ashland Inc.; Biogen Idec; BNSF Railway Company; Carnival Corporation & plc; ConAgra Foods; ConocoPhillips; Eni spa; FedEx; Halliburton; Koch Industries; Kraft Foods Inc.; Merck & Company, Inc.; Occidental Petroleum Corporation; Perdue Farms Inc.; Phillips 66; The Procter & Gamble Company; Sealed Air Corporation; Smithfield Foods, Inc.; Southern Company; Tennant Company; Union Pacific Railroad; and WW Grainger.
