The company Supply Chain Information Management (SIM) works for big purchasing organisations such as Ahold, SuperUnie, Migros and Univeg to provide insight into the production process for the retailers and so bring the umbrella term sustainability into practice. During the Jaguar seminar manager Marjan Smit indicated that making the chain sustainable is very difficult. "We're only at the beginning of making chains sustainable." SIM finds out where the products are produced for its customers. She called her colleagues 'little detectives', who find out what the production locations are, where the products are packaged, from suppliers, in other words all the information that shows what a supplier is doing to cover the sustainability and safety risk. "Because it's so unbelievably difficult to measure, most of the information we receive consists of reports. And that's just the tip of the iceberg."
"For all my clients 30% of the contract suppliers are the traders. They have their own sources for buying products. My customers, the retailers, need to know what the cultivation situation was. This is why we need product locations with the demands related to it. Traders that have gone through a lot of trouble to get their product in, hate giving up this information, as they fear that the supermarkets want to shorten the chains and cut out the traders. I can imagine this," Marjan Smit said to those present. "It's not easy to know that your buyer could manage without you, and there is a potential conflict between supplying bang on time and making the chain more sustainable, which just costs money by making processes more efficient and hiring advisors."
"This is a huge conflict that we run into. Some traders are very transparent, but there are also a lot of traders who don't want to give up information. They say: if the buyer won't really put pressure on, then we wont talk. In the end I can see that this strategy wont work. The buying game is played very highly and sometimes this means that suppliers drop off the list. But companies need to realise that meeting these sustainability demands is becoming mainstream. This might take another three or four years, but by then being able to justify where your product came from will be the norm. I sometimes compare it to the leap in food safety years ago, with obtaining BRC, HACCP and IFS certificates. It took a while, but nowadays it's a precondition."
SMit indicates that NGO's already demand the ability to pinpoint the production locations before the season starts. "I didn't know about the phenomena of 'day trade' and I can honestly say that I don't know how to solve it, but we'll make it through this too. We need leaders to give the right example every once in a while."
www.simsupplychain.com
SMit indicates that NGO's already demand the ability to pinpoint the production locations before the season starts. "I didn't know about the phenomena of 'day trade' and I can honestly say that I don't know how to solve it, but we'll make it through this too. We need leaders to give the right example every once in a while."
www.simsupplychain.com
