Breakthroughs In Supplier Collaboration

Most companies seem to be trying to address risk and CSR challenges in traditional ways, but few have had tangible achievements at scale that promote long-lasting trust. So, what’s the alternative? 

In this guest post, Procurement Leaders invites 2degrees’ Martin Chilcott to highlight a changing approach to supplier collaboration, in connection with the latest whitepaper on the subject. 

Tragedies such as Rana Plaza and incidents like the horse meat scandal in Europe highlight the human and corporate risks and challenges that stretched and fragmented supply chains face in a global economy that often lacks transparency.

Most companies seem to be trying to address these challenges in traditional ways - enforcing standards, audits, top down diktat, transactional approaches, organizing global conferences - but few have had tangible achievements at scale that promote long-lasting trust.

However, a handful of pioneering businesses have taken a different approach, using online collaboration tools and third-party facilitated programme, to build unprecedented levels of trust and transparency across their supply bases, to cut millions of dollars of costs, risks and drive innovation.

At 2degrees, we call this new approach ’fully linked collaboration’. It involves thousands of operational managers from supplier companies coming together on a managed online platform to share best practise, experience and work together to solve otherwise intractable  problems. As Rick Lloyd of Stateside Foods, a supplier to retailers such as Asda, puts it: "I can contact my opposites in big companies. There are now no inter-silos saying - ‘can’t tell you this, can’t tell you that’. It’s gone. We are sharing with Greencore and Arla Foods to discuss LED lighting and centrifugal technology for separating water. I would never have done this without this exchange. It’s a phenomenal tool."

The result is a move away from traditional ways of operating with the supply base to a more effective super-connected partnership between customer and supplier that builds resilience and secures supply.

With this in mind, Procurement Leaders, has published its Supplier Collaboration White Paper, which demonstrates the vital case for adopting a fully linked collaborative approach to supply chain management and shows how global brands are leading the way with ground-breaking supplier collaboration programs.

The whitepaper covers:

• Candid insights, input and advice from GSK, ASDA, Cranfield University, Royal Bank of Scotland, and the Institute of Grocery Distribution on the new approaches to building large scale collaboration and transparency across the supply base. 

• How ASDA’s Sustain and Save Exchange supplier program has evolved into a vital tool for its suppliers, who use the online hub to collaborate with each other, to drive efficiency and cost and risk reduction.

• How GSK went from engaging with individual suppliers to working with them at scale, in order to make a tangible difference in the sustainability performance of its supply base overall.

• New research that will help you understand how extraordinary levels of trust are built between suppliers and customers who use these new approaches.

• How you can use the critical skill of facilitation to create and reward collaborative behaviours whilst ensuring compliance with competition law.

• Examples of online community programs orchestrating a ‘richness of opportunity’ for you ‘that otherwise wouldn’t exist’.

Martin Chilcott is CEO and Founder of 2degrees, the world’s leading collaboration platform and service for sustainable business.

Published in association with 2degrees, the Procurement Leaders whitepaper on supplier collaboration can be downloaded for free, here.

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