In this short video, Steven Thacker explains Environmental Benchmarking for your Supply Chain.
“Hi, I’m Steven Thacker, director of Benchmarking Success. One of the new innovations from Benchmarking Success has been the development of the sustainability with environmental benchmarking tool. Benchmarking Success in conjunction with Blue Stone Energy has formed a partnership to develop, market and implement an environmental sustainability performance metrics or what we have referred to as ESP.
Benchmarking Success has in-depth experience in benchmarking processes and a current supply chain benchmarking database with data from more than 800 supply chains. Blue Stone Energy provides the sustainability knowledge and consulting services for this project.
Benchmarking Success and Blue Stone Energy have been working together as a team to offer customers a unique environmental benchmarking tool. Currently being assessed by the New South Wales‘ Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water.
But why? Why environmental benchmarking? The current sustainability reporting frame works only really capture specific elements of sustainability. The reason our objective comparison available between a company is environmental spin and their environmental performance. Sustainability is a new area in business and some of the definitions and terms are still vague. For example, carbon neutral or green washing. In order therefore to market environmental friendly products and services, it’s necessary for organizations to ensure that they can prove various statements that they may make.
Business hasn’t focused on environmental efficiencies in the past and there is an opportunity to increase business efficiency by looking at your processes and supply chain through the environmental aspect. Additional benefits have improving environmental performance in your business include:
1. A competitive advantage built into your products.
2. Brand protection and improved reputation.
3. Increased shareholder value.
4. A reduced risk of environmental impact and damages.
5. Attracting talented people that prefer to work for sustainable organizations.
So what is this benchmarking survey? What is this ESP? An environmental sustainability performance or ESP benchmarking survey provides businesses with the following information:
1. A quantative and objective measure over your environmental performance and cost in comparison to peer companies.
2. An analysis on environmental management cost and performance through the application of best practise benchmarks.
3. A path for environmental management development, improvements, cost reductions via development of management inputs.
4. An identification of gaps in your current sustainability approach.
5. A clear project plan with detailed actions on how to improve your environmental performance.
The report that we provide covers all nine aspects of environmental performance. These nine aspects include: materials, energy, water, biodiversity, emissions effluence and waste, products and services, compliance, transport, general management, and overall environmental management. Some of the reports that are provided in the ESP report include:
1. Strategic cost and performance management – this measures the overall organizational performance on the X-axis that you can see behind me and the environmental cost is measure on the Y-axis.
2. High level metrics where we compare champions and challengers in the environmental space – this provides report using the traffic light system of red, yellow and green to compare a company’s performance across six high level and fundamental environmental KPI’s that are required for every business.
Then there are more specific and more detailed reports on each of the environmental aspects. For example, energy performance, where such things as total energy consumed is benchmarked along with a percentage of renewable energy used and energy efficiency metrics. Or water performance, where we benchmarks such metrics as water consumed per dollar of gross sales, the percentage of water recycled, the percentage of discharged water, and water discharged spent per dollar of gross sales in the business.
These then are compared against other similar organizations. This benchmarking tool is in valuable in determining where your business is at, where best in class organizations are operating, the size of the gaps and where they are in your environmental platform, and finally, for providing a roadmap for improvement for your business.”
To learn more about our Environmental Supply Chain Benchmarking just go to this link.