Strategic Sustainable Vendor Partners
Creating Successful Sourcing Relationships Throughout the Value Chain
Opening remarks for the panel discussion Lisa Hendrickson will be moderating on March 24 @ FIT
Don’t you feel like things are moving faster and faster these days? The requirements for successful businesses to address speed, sustainability, price and product seems like a moving target?
Retailers are under increasing pressure to provide beautiful, affordable and sustainable products by their customers and thepublic at large. Retailers are responding to this demand by searching for new manufacturers or providers with a focus on sustainability or asking their current providers for sustainable solutions. Each aspect of this balancing act of sustainability, affordability, and transparency creates a more and more involved series of criterion to fulfill. How do suppliers, manufacturers and retailers find a bridge between old school industrial – era materials and manufacturing sourcing and the sustainable promise of the sustainable economy?
Some people have called sustainability “the world’s largest change management project ever” and with the shifts in thinking required to bring sustainability to the forefront the team that you bring to help achieve the goal is paramount. Assembling new teams of “strategic sustainable vendor partners” will be the difference between winning the sustainable manufacturing game or playing catch up. So how might we be able to successfully create the vendor partner relationships that help us fulfill on the requirements? We see there’s an implied or unexpressed criterion that each company has to support sustainability—however there lacks a consistency as to the approach to sustainability. Although some companies follow things like LEED or other certifications, there still is wiggle room for company’s personal peccadillos around sustainability. This creates a need for companies to share their requirements in a way that produces the best results while addressing the criterion.
Using Toyota’s strategic vendor partner relationship model as a blueprint for creating sustainable sourcing relationships, we can see embedding the originating company’s sustainability criterion into the strategic vendor partner’s activities will shape the materials sourcing and manufacturing of the product to fit the sustainability requirements. It sounds simple from the onset and knowing the complexities of materials sourcing and product making the complexity of these activities will require each partner to find the solutions that fit the criterion while expanding their own knowledge of the solutions pool available now and seeing the opportunities and limitations of current available materials and processes. This road is murky at times and it’s the birthplace of innovation—finding solutions to problems that show themselves in the midst of solution generation has us see how deep we can build relationships to create the sustainable economy and the solutions required to implement it.
