Lean, Green, Global Machine

You’ve heard of carbon dating — but in Japan and the UK at least, consumer product companies have begun rolling out “carbon labels” on what they sell. The labels tell purchasers the amount of carbon dioxide released during the manufacturing, marketing, distribution and likely disposal of the product.  Procurement professionals are adept at looking back through a supply chain — but this approach also has us “forward thinking” through the whole lifecycle of a product.

I think sustainability initiatives are likely to be with us over the long haul. They are themselves sustainable, if you will, so we should be prepared to manage them. One of the basic steps is to establish your enterprise’s standards for evaluating environmental impact. The rise and fall of ethanol is a great example of how an idea for moving away from fossil fuels was tarnished by questions about its overall impact and the pressure it puts on food supplies.

Japan, the UK, and Scandinavian countries are moving quickly to create independent assessments of sustainability. The carbon labeling is just one example. Here in the U.S., we have Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards for buildings. A Green Restaurant trade group has set up a certification process for “sustainable dining,” and you can look to your own industry groups to find out how they are setting standards for sustainability.
In the absence of industry metrics – you might follow the example of Herman Miller, which set itself these goals by 2020:
•    zero landfill
•    zero hazardous waste generation
•    100% green energy
•    all buildings LEED Silver certified
•    100% of sales from products designed for the environment
Those targets may be aggressive for your company, but they do provide a good framework for prioritizing and measuring green progress. Back them up by planning and executing steps to reach them. Once your own house is in order, you can turn to your suppliers – wherever they are – and negotiate standards for them.
What is absolutely clear is that companies can no longer ship their environmental issues to offshore suppliers. Even in countries where regulations may be lax, watchdog groups are vigilant, and bad news travels at Internet speeds.
The imperatives are clear, but like any transformation, it may not happen overnight. Still, with continuous support, you can turn your company into a lean, green, global machine.

Riding the economic Tsunami

Darwin probably said it best – the fittest will survive. That’s also the assessment of my colleague in the UK, Robin Jackson, CEO of ADR International. If you haven’t seen ADR’s newsletter, this is what he had to say:

“The business environment has changed fundamentally and we will have to look back to the great depression of the 1930s, the collapse of South American economies in the 1970s and 1980s and Japan’s “lost decade” of the 1990s to draw lessons.

In this radically changed environment it is vital for the survival of businesses for procurement leaders to consider new ways of handling these challenges and develop new offensive and defensive sourcing strategies.

Remember this is a once-in-a-century readjustment of prices. Only if you are bold and act speedily will your business survive. Your competitors will be doing it and to survive you will need to do it too.

It’s time to call in the favours – if ever there was a time for strategic co-operation with key suppliers, this is it. If they don’t live up to their part of the strategic partnership billing, move swiftly to find alternative partners. Leverage your strategic supplier relationships. Be demanding and move rapidly.

Conserve your cash. Even if your business can borrow it is more expensive to do so now. So extend payment terms to the maximum without damaging the viability of your suppliers.

If you receive a price increase request then the supplier must be having a joke. With basic commodities falling in price by 40 per cent or more (a barrel of oil is down 70 per cent) how can any supplier claim their input costs are increasing? Any increases caused by the fall in the value of currency will be more than offset by the collapse in input prices.

Your defensive strategy should include preparing now for possible disruption of your supply chain. Disruption can result from suppliers going bankrupt, economic meltdown in countries, significant currency fluctuations and political unrest, so plan carefully how your business will manage it by developing detailed countermeasures.

In China the number of bankruptcies has increased significantly and this has led to an increase in social instability – imagine the chaos if a new political regime closed China’s borders to the West again, or Russia switched off the gas.

We need more than ever to be aware of currency movements and take them into account in all our procurement decisions. Given the volatility now inherent in the world economy, today’s low-cost destination of choice could be tomorrow’s high-cost country to avoid.

In this climate, it almost certainly makes sense to shorten your supply chain to reduce risk and vulnerability, so local sourcing could become the new must-do procurement strategy to replace the obsession with low-cost country sourcing of recent years.


These are unprecedented times. So our strategy for 2009 should be: be bold, be brave, act swiftly and be ruthless. Develop new offensive and defensive ideas and ways of working. Only then will you and your business have a chance to survive this economic tsunami.”

Thanks, Robin. We should all bookmark this. Post it on our desktops and build it into our work plan every day for 2009.

Find more articles by Robin and others at our ADI International web site. 

 

About ADR North America

 

ADR North America, based in Ann Arbor has been a leader in purchasing consultancy for more than twenty years.

ADR North America is part of a global group of consultants – ADR International — in Australia, North America, South Africa and the United Kingdom who have worked with over 200 clients in more than 50 countries. Among our clients are many of the world’s largest companies. Our consultants are recognized experts in the field and have authored hundreds of articles and commentaries in professional journals.

Our products and consultancy services have proven their ability to transform global company purchasing operations. We can start with innovative baseline assessments, move on to create and implement purchasing category strategies, and finish by developing staff skills to bring increasing value to a company. As appropriate, our consultants can deliver all or any part of a purchasing transformation. In short, ADR is purchasing knowledge, applied.

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Ann Arbor, MI 48106
Phone: +1 734-930-5070