How are cost and carbon interlinked in my supply chain?
James: One of the things that really strikes me is how waste, efficiency, logistics and inventory and are so interlinked when it comes to cost & carbon. It seems as though wasted resource is wasted carbon, right?
Hilary: What I'd be saying to everyone is - are you making your goods yourself and where are all your raw materials coming from?
You want to make sure that you're minimising the amount of time that you're using for your transport. Now, when I say minimise, I don't mean you put everything on an aeroplane. What I mean is, you do one shipment a month, you consolidate shipments so that it's one shipment.
Now that's good from a carbon standpoint but you're now tying up your cash. So again, what the optimum solution potentially would be, is to source locally, initially. It's to do with the size of the company and how much money you can afford to get tied up.
In terms of your transportation if you are transporting things,
Does it have to come by air freight?
Does it have to come by sea freight?
Could it go by train?
Could it go by truck?
There's loads of different ways, and what you can actually do with freight carriers now is you can mix and match. So you could say one part of my journey is going to be by truck, for example, and one part is going to be by train.
So you're making these small improvements from a transport standpoint, and as I've said - source locally as that will automatically do it.
Any other supplier that you've got, are you going to choose a low carbon supplier? It's helping you on your journey if you're starting with a low carbon supplier rather than actually having to educate that supplier as well and take them on the same journey that you're going on.
I've touched on inventory management, because the more inventory you've got, the bigger the warehouse, the more energy you need to run it. So how do you avoid overstocking at all costs, and that feeds right back to how good is your forecasting?
The use of sustainable packaging is another area, so how do you package your stuff? Sometimes in smaller companies, you can over engineer things, as you're looking for excellence.
You need to stop thinking like that.
Get to your 80%,
If it's good enough, let's do it.
The other thing is, how much time your product is going to spend in that box.
If it's one hour, the box doesn't need to be absolutely rock solid. If it's three weeks, you need to use a more robust solution. So it's those kind of things to look at.
Can you remove the plastic bags that potentially are in the box..... there's loads of things you can look at.