Blog

Eurostar improves supply chain transparency with SupplierPortal - case study

Eurostar is the only high-speed railway service connecting London with Avignon, Brussels, Lille, Lyon, Marseille and Paris. All its trains traverse the Channel Tunnel between the United Kingdom and France. Since it started in 1994, Eurostar has carried over 150 million passengers across the Channel.

The challenge

As a business working across a range of destinations for over twenty years, Eurostar has always had a strong sense of responsibility to the environment and the communities in which it operates.

Why Sustainable Supply Chains Matter

This article was recently published on Environmental Leader. 

Environmental managers and chief sustainability officers are increasingly looking to their supply chains to conserve natural resources and reduce carbon emissions.

Considering supply chains are responsible for up to four times the greenhouse gas emissions of a company’s direct operations and many suppliers operate in water-stressed areas of the globe, this makes sense from an environmental savings standpoint.

To this end, we’ve seen major corporations like Apple push for more rigorous environmental standards and renewable energy use across its supply chain — and publish regular supply chain audit reports detailing suppliers’ progress — and Nike creating an entirely new apparel supply chain company that will “embed sustainability and transparency into the business.”

Greenbiz Forum Blog Series. Part 3: Save our planet! It’s the only one with suppliers

Greenstone's Head of Client Services, David Wynn attended the annual Greenbiz Conference in Phoenix (17th-19th February 2015). In this blog series he reflects on some of the key trends from the event.

“Save our planet! It's the only one with coffee” was Jim Hanna at Starbuck’s closing quip at Greenbiz Forum 2015. As Director of Environmental Affairs for the coffee giant, his ‘one great idea’ pitch was scaling sustainable innovation. And with over 12,000 global stores that’s no easy challenge. The challenge of engaging with suppliers at scale is twofold. How do you engage suppliers on environmental issues? But even more challengingly, how do you engage suppliers on environmental issues that span interconnected and dependant supply chain processes?

Supply chains: an essential part of brand management

Supermarkets and the horsemeat scandal, technology companies and environmental mismanagement, issues with illegal logging in the construction sector, human rights allegations in the fashion industry… There is a long list of recent examples highlighting just how important supply chains are in the management and development of brand reputation. With competition across all sectors now fiercer than ever, organisations must ensure that suppliers enhance their reputation and do not put it at risk.

How can online tools help you focus on suppliers that really matter

It’s impractical and unrealistic to expect buyers to use a manual process for managing supplier information requests. Asking all of your suppliers to complete an anti-bribery or working conditions questionnaire by email and spreadsheets is not efficient and for organisations with thousands of suppliers it is impossible; the administrative overheads are too great. It’s why organisations typically focus on just the suppliers they knew well already but it means there are potentially many gaps in the supply chain which go unnoticed.

With an online process, there is no reason why you can’t ask everyone the same set of core compliance questions and then go deeper on those suppliers that are material to your organisation.

Why use an online process to collect supplier questionnaire responses?

For many organisations, collecting survey information from suppliers relies on a manual process. This typically means suppliers will be emailed a questionnaire form that they then fill in, sign, and then scan and send back via email.

With this manual process, buyers are spending a lot of time collecting the information, chasing out responses and trying to make sure that the questionnaire is completed. For many, it takes up so much of their time, that they can't then spend any more time focusing on the analysis side. This means there is no real understanding of what is really happening with their suppliers and limits the opportunities to identify areas of risk in the supply chain.