The guide to hitting your Scope 3 target with confidence: Improvement - Manufacture 2030

Article 4 of 4 - Improvement

“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 final article in a four-part series written for an audience with a manufacturing supply chain and either a Net Zero or Science Based Target for reducing their upstream carbon impact.

In the first article, we gave an overview of the three steps that are essential to achieving your Scope 3 supply chain carbon reduction target. In subsequent articles, we dived deeper into each of the first two steps.

To recap, those three steps were:

1. Measure: go beyond historical, enterprise-level data collection and measure in detail each supplier manufacturing site’s baseline carbon emissions (Scope 1, 2 and 3) and their estimated glidepath towards your target, based upon their reduction action plans.
2. Manage: use the glidepath data you have collected to understand the gap to your target and manage their progress to close that gap.
3. Improve: accelerate improvement by building the supplier’s capacity, focused specifically on closing their identified gap to your target.

In this final article, we will consider how you can improve your suppliers’ capacity so that they can implement their action plans, accelerate carbon reductions and get their glidepath on track to your target.

So here it goes.

You don’t need data - you need improvement

This is where the rubber hits the road. Measuring and managing your suppliers’ emissions is all meaningless if they don’t improve their performance and cut carbon fast enough for you to hit your Scope 3 target.

You can have complete visibility of the carbon emitted across your supply base and have the right incentives in place, and yet your suppliers still can’t change fast enough. Here are the main reasons why and what you can do about them:

1. Suppliers often lack the requisite ‘know-how’ and technical capability

If you have read the previous two articles, you will know how you can help your suppliers to identify the gap between their current reduction ‘glidepath’ and your target. If, as we recommend, you are collecting data through supplier action plans, you will also be in a position to compare plans and outcomes and so help each supplier identify exactly what extra initiatives they could add to their action plans to close their gap to your target.

With that insight you can now focus on helping your suppliers develop the exact technical know-how and capability they need. The great news is, that because you are working with hundreds (perhaps thousands) of your suppliers, the engineering and procurement knowledge they need is probably somewhere in your supply base already, but stuck in silos. You need to unlock it, and your suppliers’ action plans will tell you exactly where that knowledge sits and it doesn’t take much encouragement to get teams from one organisation to share their insights with their peers from another. If everyone is doing it, everyone wins.

At Manufacture 2030, we use the insights we get from the detailed site-level data we collect to share knowledge like this in a number of ways, including:

Inside our platform, we have an evergreen and growing database of approximately 500 actions for reducing environmental impacts. Each action has functionality to enable teams from different supplier sites, working on the same action, to share insights, ask questions etc.
Via peer-to-peer webinars and masterclasses that give suppliers an opportunity to showcase their sustainability initiatives, while providing tips and advice on particular subjects. Some of the most popular sessions have attracted hundreds of eager engineers. You can see an example of one of our webinars below.

In pre- and (hopefully) post-Covid times, through on-site treasure hunts where engineers are invited to a site to see an example of a process or technology in return for helping the host to identify opportunities for savings that they may have otherwise missed.