28 June 2018
Insights Agility Group CSR

Best Practices for Sustainable Supply Chain

Best practices for sustainability in supply chain also mean tough questions for companies. Agility’s Mariam Al-Foudery lays out some key areas for consideration.

Best practices for sustainability are evolving as rapidly as any aspect of business, driven by new technology and an urgency for companies to demonstrate that they are effective environmental stewards and positive contributors to society.

Here are some key areas where logistics providers and their customers need to focus.

Mariam Al-Foudery, Group Chief Marketing Officer, Agility
Mariam Al-Foudery, Group Chief Marketing Officer, Agility

  • Traceability

    Do you have upstream supplier visibility? Do you do supplier assessments and benchmarking?

  • Labor

    If migrant workers are in your employee mix, are you certain that they aren’t being exploited by labor brokers and unscrupulous recruiters, a problem that is particularly problematic for companies that hire from India, Nepal and East Africa?
    Have you continued to focus on living and working conditions? Are you confident you have transparency into subcontractors? Have you created effective worker-grievance mechanisms? Are you educating and training workers on their rights?

  • Energy

    When you expand your truck fleet, are you adding CNG fueling stations and LNG vehicles?

  • Packaging

    If you are a consumer company, what about dimensional weight pricing?

  • Warehousing

    Have you looked at automation and cleantech in cargo handling and warehousing?

  • Port selection

    Are you routing shipments through “green terminals” that manage and contain possible pollutants and police for invasive species?

  • Logistics digitization

    Agility is among those using advanced algorithms to evaluate multiple scenarios and create optimal plans with the least environmental impact. Multi-echelon Inventory Optimization is another tool available.

  • Data and measurement

    Are you capturing, sharing and analyzing data with your logistics provider so you can get real-time feedback to optimize operations and make sure you are conserving, recycling, recovering and reusing as much as you can?

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