Vendor and supply chain management by atorres

Congratulations, your proposal has been named a finalist in the Climate CoLab Waste management contest. You have until July 20th to edit your proposal. The Judges suggest that you focus your edits on the topics listed below. It’s not clear what the proposal means by footprint, is it just carbon, or the entire environmental footprint? In the judges’ opinion, a focus on sustainability is too broad. The judges would suggest that the author focus on the carbon impact of supply chain. If the proposal addressed the carbon footprint of supply chains, that might be feasible, though still challenging. It’s difficult to push companies about their supply chain practices if they are competing in industries like steel or basic commodities. Companies that are most concerned about things like this are those that interact with consumers, like WalMart, Hanes, PepsiCo, Colgate, Unilever. So it would also be good to focus on supply chains in business-to-consumer sectors. Even if the scope is narrowed, measuring the carbon footprint of supply chains is not easy. There needs to be more detail on how one supplier’s carbon footprint would be measured vs. another. The how is glossed over somewhat in the proposal, but that’s where rubber meets road, and there is a need for more detail. In some areas there are already benchmarks, for example, the EPAs Energy Star program for industry has benchmarks in some industry sectors. Another is Scope 3 http://www.ghgprotocol.org/standards/scope-3-standard. This project might start with existing benchmarks like this and build on them. There also are companies that are trying to develop tools like this, so it would be helpful if the author could show some awareness of other efforts that are being undertaken in this realm and how this project is distinctive compared to competitors. It would be very helpful if the author could contact an executive at a company like Pepsi or Hanes and get some real world feedback. If it seems of interest to an executive at that of firm, then the idea might have potential. If the project could come up with tool that can be broadly applied by many companies, it could be of great interest.