Article 2 of 4 - Measurement
“For 12 years, we’ve pioneered new ways to spread sustainable practices across manufacturing supply chains. We partnered with some amazing brands like Tesco, GSK, Asda-Walmart, Coop and Unilever… Not everything we tried worked, but a lot did. And we made it our mission to learn even more. …. This is the summation of those best bits.”
Previously…
This is the second article in a four-part series written for an audience with a manufacturing supply chain. It’s perfect for you if you know what areas you need to focus on, have a Scope 3 target and you are now faced with a practical question of how best to achieve that target with confidence. But, it will still be useful even if you are working these things out.
In the first article, I gave an overview of the three steps that are essential to achieving your Scope 3 supply chain, carbon reduction target. To recap, those three steps were:
- Measure: wherever possible, go beyond historical, enterprise-level data collection and measure in detail each supplier’s baseline carbon emissions (Scope 1, 2 and 3) and their estimated glidepath towards your target based upon their reduction action plans.
- Manage: use the glidepath data you have collected to understand your suppliers' gap to your target and manage their progress to close that gap.
- Improve: accelerate improvement by building the suppliers' capacity, focused specifically on closing their identified gaps to your target.
You need to be able to do this at scale: hundreds and thousands of times simultaneously and that will require technology.
In this article, we are going to dive into step one: Measure.
Health warning
First, a quick health warning. Although, in this article, we are talking about the ‘measure’ stage in the process, if your objective is to reduce emissions it is essential that ‘measure’ is part of an integrated process with ‘manage’ and ‘improve’; looping back to ‘measure’ and so on (see diagram 1). Don’t just start by ‘measuring’ - start a process that involves all three.
