Being more effective is a goal in any business and any life area for sure. Not everyone has this ability. Luckily, there are some things you can learn in order to rise your productivity level. We are here to offer you our 6 ways to make your supply chain more sustainable. There are companies that can help you find the way it works for you in the industry you are interested in. And if you find experienced movers and packers Jeddah based, they will most probably have the answers you are looking for.
Ways to make your supply chain more sustainable
More and more companies expend their sustainability programs in direction of including suppliers. But often they struggle with implementing it. Some events like fires in Bangladesh and collapses prove this to be true. Logistic companies in Middle East have the need for the increase and urgent action is highlighted. This is a complex thing to do for sure. Yet, the failure to act can be a far bigger risk. Companies can find ways to make their supply chain more sustainable, and here are some ideas.
1. Make a map of your supply chain
The problem is that many companies actually don’t have an understanding of the sustainability impact on their supply chain. So the first thing that inventory suppliers have to do is to identify the most important social challenges they have and also to prioritize efforts with their suppliers. Doing clinical trial logistics can be such an important thing. Because whenever something should be different, people should know where the change is starting.
2. Be clear on your expectations
Once you understand where you are starting, make a clear path to it. It is smart to know your expectations. After you have done that, you should establish them and communicate well through a supplier code. Have in mind that cold chain logistics companies offer some specific services that can be great and very useful. Some of them are urgent medical shipments, some clinical trial materials, and even new medical technologies that will cure sick and helpless people.
3. Basic supplier performance
After you know your targeted supplier and you have compliance standards, you can start collecting data from suppliers with help of a simple benchmark questionnaire. Self-assessment can be really smart and helpful. So, this will give you a clear understanding of the starting point. Many organizations started evaluating the performance of the suppliers they work with. Questionaries and surveys are great to help. More and more companies started using those tools. And they include also a code of conduct on self-assessments connected to the parts of their business that is of the biggest priority. Some sectors (like the electronics and pharmaceutical industry) developed industrywide surveys to help reduce the weight on suppliers who need to respond to several requests for complete information.
4. Develop training programs
So there are ways to make your supply chain more sustainable. This is the key: once you find out which areas can be improved, you should start making some changes. You can use external resources as support, or you can use some tailored ones for specific sector needs. An effective way to transfer knowledge across the supply chain is to use the best practices as leverage and case studies from the best-performing suppliers at vendor conferences. You can make an online training module and also capacity-building campaigns. You can either showcase successes of selected companies that are recognized or demonstrate the benefits of sustainability that are noted in practice.
5. Put energy into performance improvement
As you slowly work on incorporating improvements, it would be smart to measure them over time. Once you implement an audit program, prepare to act on improving and executing the right action plans with clear communication on the results and your own expectations to suppliers. You can develop a capacity-building program and terminate suppliers if the trend of non-compliance persists.
You can pair up assessments and audits with incentive programs that keep rewarding sustainability performance. Encourage transparency and select or reward good examples from practice. In situations where this isn’t possible, give some incentives to customers or clients. Those can be effective, too. If you want to avoid fatigue and provide some common frameworks for evaluation, try to develop common auditing and assessment tools.
6. Make some industry collaborations
It is obvious to many companies that supply chain challenges are complex and sometimes can’t be solved by industrial efforts. That’s when industrywide collaborations should take place. Even though they work in a highly competitive environment and they share the chain of suppliers, they can set some common standards and share the best practices to sustain performance and allow suppliers to evaluate with the same metrics. So those collaborations help preventions of audit fatigue and training redundancy as well as those mountains of paperwork that are needed from suppliers for their customers. This coworking between industries is a great way to share knowledge about those important topics. The effect can be positive on customers too, who see some healthy competition while companies try to please their needs.
Now you know ways to make your supply chain more sustainable
Some companies in the Middle East understand the importance of this topic and are willing to go further and do even more. Some of them develop robust tracking tools. They often include software solutions to help monitor supplier performance and improvements over a period of time. The others perform a logistics assessment to decide where they can make some sustainability improvements. It is possible to integrate the criteria of the sustainability chain into the procurement process. You can create a shift by leveraging your buying power and influence. Encourage innovation between your employees. And equally important: don’t fall into the biggest risk of all – skip doing or changing anything. Because this mistake could really cost your company a lot. And now you see: there are ways to make your supply chain more sustainable.
