Is this scenario familiar to you?
You’ve selected your suppliers, and on-boarded their information. If you use spreadsheets or paper to manage this process, you’ve spent an inordinate amount organising, assembling, and maintaining this information as well.
From the information they’ve sent, you can’t spot any ESG-related issues, so you’ve done your responsible sourcing.
Then further down the line, you discover that your suppliers aren’t adhering to their responsible sourcing policies.
Now your company is known to have been working with companies with dubious activities. It’s not good morally. It’s not good ethically, and it’s not good for brand.
With the world increasing scrutiny and visibility surrounding these concerns, it’s never been more important to build an ethical supply base.
Five Reasons to Verify Responsible Sourcing.
To Increase Due Diligence
Above everything else, ensuring that your company isn’t causing any negative impact is the most important issue.
Whether it’s to the environment, consumers or employees, any damage should be avoided at all costs.
Therefore, it’s imperative to ensure you are doing absolutely everything you can to minimise risks, adopt best practices and ensure safety to your consumers.
You need to ensure you are working with robust, trustworthy suppliers who are offering a strong and safe output.
To Protect your Brand from Damages
Furthermore, if your company activities result in negative impact, it can result in damage to brand reputation.
Therefore, preventative measures must be in place, to trace supplier activities and identify where supplier risk is heightened.
To Prevent Investor Issues
Since reputational damage often results in business loss, investors want to know whether your company’s ESG measures are in-place. This extends to the suppliers that you work with.
Therefore, for the investors, they’ll be able to have further confidence in supplier activities if this information is verified.
To Help you Achieve your Targets
With the world in a state of climate emergency, company supply chains form a significant proportion of carbon emissions. Organisations are under a great deal of necessary pressure to achieve ambitious environmental goals, particularly regarding the reduction, and complete elimination of carbon emissions.
On average, the largest proportion of emissions in a company’s supply chain are Scope 3. These are emissions that are caused by the company indirectly.
This encompasses the activities of your company’s suppliers on your behalf. Therefore, you need to make sure, now more than ever, that supplier values align with your own.
To Improve Supplier Transparency
A problem can't be fixed until you know that it is present.
By encouraging supply base transparency, you gain a more comprehensive overview of the supply base. Consequently, you can identify measures that need to be taken regarding your suppliers, to achieve your own targets.
How can you adopt responsible sourcing?
ARCUS® Supplier Management Software allows you to efficiently on-board ESG information from your suppliers, significantly increasing your level of transparency.
With ARCUS® AI, our smart technology add-on, the information is automatically authenticated when supplier supporting documentation is scanned and verified at the point of upload through, eliminating the need to complete time-consuming, manual checks.
Additionally, you will have full confidence that due diligence has been undertaken in your processes, which drastically minimises any risk factors.
By integrating with various other systems across ESG activities, data is centralised within ARCUS® directly from the original source, which removes data silos and provides you with the ability to view information within a real-time dashboard.
Combined with supplier information on-boarded via questionnaire templates, this offers a comprehensive visual oversight of ESG activities across your supply base, making it easy to identify any risk areas, so swift action can be taken, and problems are avoided before they occur.
To learn more about ARCUS® Supplier Management Software and responsible sourcing, see our page here.