Climate change. Disappearing rainforests. The greenhouse effect. Natural disasters. Forced and slave labor. Acidification of the ocean. Overpopulation. Pestilence and drought. Sounds like the makings of a summer movie blockbuster, but in fact the interest in—and demand for—environmentally friendly business practices has grown at such a rapid pace in recent years that a movement that's gone under various names over the years—conservation, ecology, environmentalism, green—has blossomed into the sustainability movement. It's gone from the “it's just a fad” stage to the “what's our eco-business strategy and how do we execute on it?” stage. And for businesses, it all falls under the heading of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which is a somewhat elastic concept but generally refers to the measurement of how sustainable a company's business practices are—not from a financial perspective but from an impact-on-the-world perspective.¹

When economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman wrote in 1970 that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,” he clearly had no idea how often that quote would be cited as evidence that academics who spend their entire careers in ivory towers just don't get it. Friedman, after all, never served as the CEO of a manufacturing company nor had to stand in front of a microphone fielding questions from angry shareholders demanding to know why, for instance, his company supported human trafficking or why it discriminated against the LGBTQ community or why it deprived local farmers of access to clean water. And he certainly never calculated the impact of climate change or documented his carbon footprint. Friedman would've had a tough time winning a Nobel Prize in today's economy.²

So what exactly is sustainability? According to the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) definition, sustainability is based on this simple principle: “Everything that we need for our survival and well-being depends, either directly or indirectly, on our natural environment. To pursue sustainability is to create and maintain the conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony to support present and future generations.”³

There's no denying that the sustainability movement is a veritable holy war, prone to inspiring heights of hyperbole on the furthest ends of the ideological spectrum, from pronouncements that removing every gasoline-powered vehicle from the highways is the sole salvation of the planet to claims that global warming is a hoax concocted by alternative energy producers and shareholders. We could devote an entire book discussing the politics of sustainability, but for the purposes of this chapter, we'll focus on the business of sustainability, and specifically on how to realign your supply chain so that it becomes more cost-efficient, more energy-efficient, less wasteful, more attractive to investors and customers, and ultimately, more productive.

Champions of CSR

Supply chain professionals can be the champions of CSR initiatives, says Gina Manis-Anderson, founder and CEO of consulting firm Savii Group, because “they know how to think outside the box, and can use change management principles to show the CEOs and CFOs how to integrate CSR into the overarching corporate strategy.” Customers, she avers, want companies to look at more than just profits, referencing an Edelman study that found that 87% of consumers expect companies to hold the interests of society on an equal footing as their business interests.⁴

“Supply chain leaders have the most influential voice in the CSR conversation, and can be the gatekeepers of getting sustainability and corporate consciousness initiatives off the whiteboard and into action,” Manis-Anderson points out. Going beyond the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profits, she says, can lead to substantial benefits to companies of all sizes. For instance, focusing on having transparency throughout every stage and link in the supply chain can help to protect the supply chain itself.

“If your supply chain is to be effective in meeting CSR standards, it must be operating at the highest of ethics,” she says. Also, by initiating ongoing conversations with suppliers to achieve greater transparency, companies will not only enhance their CSR efforts but will also provide more opportunities for innovation, efficiency, and cost savings. “Stronger supplier relationships can also uncover potential improvements in product quality,” she adds.⁵

Corporate Irresponsibility

Although the modern environmental movement dates back at least to the 1960s, 1970 is usually cited as the beginning of the movement because the first Earth Day celebration and the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency occurred that year. But like many movements with both ideological and political motivations at their roots, setting environmental goals has proven to be significantly easier than achieving them, especially when the goalposts are frequently moved and even more especially since attaining those goals requires substantial and consistent participation from industry. When the EPA was formed, for instance, cleaning up air pollution was part and parcel of its mandate, and numerous regulations emerged that led to various developments propelling that goal, such as the introduction of unleaded gasoline, cleaner burning engines for motor vehicles, and the issuance of air quality standards under the Clean Air Act of 1970.

Today, 50 years later, air pollution falls almost at the very bottom of a list of corporate supply chain sustainability goals, according to a 2020 study conducted by the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics and the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP). With more than 1,100 supply chain professionals weighing in, the study reveals what the MIT/CSCMP researchers admit was “a surprising result”: Air pollution and natural resource conservation are low-priority items today when it comes to sustainability. Social issues, in particular the eradication of child labor and forced labor, are seen as the most important sustainability issues for their companies to focus on. However, that doesn't necessarily translate into focused, measurable initiatives to improve human rights throughout the supply chain.⁶

Consider the nature of the modern supply chain, and the impact that technology has had on how we can move people, goods, and information. It's now possible to order a product in the morning and have it delivered to you that same afternoon. Medicines and other essential items can be flown by drone to the remotest outposts of the desert or the most impassable mountain ranges.

But it's also made it possible for bad actors to hack into supposedly secure databases to obtain passwords, transactional information, account numbers, and all manner of data that expose consumers and corporations alike to breaches perpetrated by unknown and often impossible-to-track cybercriminals. The constant demand for products that can be delivered as close to instantaneously as possible has led far too many desperate—and unscrupulous—companies to turn a blind eye toward the network of lower-tier suppliers within their supply chains who often act with reckless disregard for basic human rights. As we saw in Chapter 9, while globalization has led to a much larger customer base for companies, it's also exposed the propensity among bad actors to exploit workers both at home (undocumented migrant labor) and abroad (sweatshops and forced labor). And even the best-run and most ethical multinational companies often find it difficult to consistently keep tabs on what's going on in the furthest reaches of their supply chains.

“A lean, agile supply chain network is important in the hyper-competitive global marketplace, but an increased reliance on contractors and their subcontractors brings all kinds of increased risk and with it a heightened responsibility to closely vet and monitor supplier performance and behavior,” notes Thomas Derry, CEO of the Institute for Supply Management (ISM), a trade organization offering educational and professional certification services. This can be a quite daunting task, he observes, as some Fortune 500 companies might have 10,000 or more suppliers under contract, and unethical behavior by just one of those suppliers could damage a company's reputation considerably—sometimes irreparably.

“Among suppliers, and their own subcontractors, poor working conditions, loose financial transactions, skirting of environmental regulations, or substandard quality in parts or materials can all turn into scandals that affect the contracting organization,” Derry says. “As a result, corporations must constantly vet and monitor supplier performance and behavior.”

Toward that end, the ISM has developed formal guidelines for sustainability and CSR. Some of these principles include:

• Do not tolerate corruption in any form.
• Promote diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout your company.
• Support environmental precaution and promote environmental responsibility.
• Value, respect, and enforce human rights.⁷

Who's Minding the Supply Chain?

On the subject of human rights, slavery didn't come to an end with the Emancipation Proclamation; unfortunately, it is still very much alive and well in the world, with more than 40 million victims of modern slavery and nearly 25 million toiling in some form of forced labor (according to the Global Slavery Index),⁸ and it's been estimated that two out of every three of those victims support corporate supply chains in some fashion. The top five products at risk of modern slavery being imported into G20 countries are electronic devices (especially computers and smartphones), apparel, fish, cocoa, and sugarcane.

Every year, roughly $150 billion are generated by companies as the result of forced labor, says Helen Carter, lead consultant with Action Sustainability. It's a myth, she explains, that modern slavery is mostly confined to sex trafficking, which actually only makes up 20% of all instances. The vast majority of slavery situations occur in manufacturing, agriculture, construction, mining, textiles, utilities, and domestic work. It's also a myth, Carter adds, that modern slavery only takes place in emerging countries. More than 1.5 million people are toiling in slavery conditions in Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan.⁹

One of the problems is that corporations as a whole don't do a very good job of monitoring the entirety of their supply chains on how well they're doing protecting human rights. For instance, the Corporate Human Rights Benchmark (CHRB), a ranking of global companies created by an investor alliance, scores each company on how well it performs when it comes to demonstrating respect for human rights (e.g., child and forced labor, women's rights, working hours, water use, sourcing practices). These scores are based on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and a perfect score would be 100%, which means the company discloses how it measures and monitors every item on the CHRB list.¹⁰

Not a single company in the study—mostly manufacturers and retailers in the food, apparel, and oil and gas industries—scored a 90% or higher, which using the traditional academic grading scale would be considered an A. What's more, only one company (footwear manufacturer Adidas) scored between 80% and 90%, the equivalent of a B grade. And only two other companies—BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, both involved in mining—got the equivalent of a C grade by scoring between 70% and 80%. In fact, nearly two-thirds of the companies ended up earning less than 30% in the CHRB ranking, and many are familiar names, such as Costco, Hershey's, Kraft Heinz, Kroger, McDonald's, Mondelez, Starbucks, Target, Walmart, and Yum! Brands.

It needs to be pointed out that the CRHB study doesn't suggest or imply that these companies are themselves violating any human rights anywhere in the world; what it does suggest, though, is that these companies aren't doing a very thorough job of measuring and reporting their performance relative to various human rights issues. There's even a term that's often used to describe companies that speak a good sustainability game but fail to live up to their CSR promises: greenwashing. The MIT/CSCMP sustainability study referenced earlier points explicitly to this practice: “Some publicly stated goals may not match actual invested resources and can be perceived as a form of greenwashing.” While social issues are often highlighted as critical goals for companies, when it comes right down to putting their money where their mouths are, companies more often than not will focus on more easily measurable (and perhaps, more cost justifiable) environmental goals, such as carbon reduction.¹¹

The Black Elephant in the Room

Indeed, when it comes to CSR initiatives, the elephant in the room is that, if left to their own devices, many and perhaps most manufacturers would opt out of participating. To say that some have been dragged kicking and screaming into adopting eco-friendly practices might be only a mild exaggeration. “What's in it for me?” is not an uncommon reaction among executives given the dictate to start measuring, and then improving, their company's sustainability. It's also accurate that compliance with various regulations aimed explicitly at corporate supply chains, such as the Dodd–Frank Act, the California Transparency in Supply Chain Act, and the UK Modern Slavery Act, has prompted movement where perhaps that movement would not have been made otherwise.

Author Thomas Friedman refers to “a black elephant,” a phrase first coined by environmentalist Adam Sweidan, which combines the concept of a “black swan event”—a rare, unpredictable, surprise occurrence—and “the elephant in the room”—that annoying problem or situation everybody is aware of but nobody wants to talk about. As Sweidan relates in Friedman's book, Thank You for Being Late, there is a gathering herd of environmental black elephants, including global warming, deforestation, ocean acidification, and mass biodiversity extinction. “When they hit, we'll claim they were black swans that no one could have predicted, but in fact they are black elephants, very visible right now.”¹²

According to a survey conducted by analyst firm IDC Manufacturing Insights, the main reason why companies get involved in any kind of sustainability initiative in the first place is to comply with government and/or other regulations (42% of responses), and that's by a two-to-one margin over the next closest response. Twenty-one percent say they've gotten into sustainability projects because of a mandate and/or pressure from customers and consumers. Coming in third, with 20% of responses, is the opportunity to reduce costs.¹³

The idea of a cap-and-trade market has been proposed in the United States in recent years, one that would be modeled somewhat on a market adopted by the European Union in 2005 as a result of the Kyoto Protocol. The “cap” refers to a limit imposed on companies on the amount of their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The “trade” refers to a market where companies needing a higher limit than regulations allow can in fact buy credits for additional emissions from companies that are producing far fewer emissions than they're allowed. The merits of such a plan are subject to debate, and while a cap-and-trade program was proposed as part of a clean energy bill during the Obama administration, and even approved by Congress, the bill never got through the Senate. It's still unclear as to whether the United States will eventually adopt cap-and-trade provisions or some sort of a carbon tax, as the idea still seems to be a volatile political hot potato.

However, as Andrew Winston, an expert on green business, sees it, “climate change regulations are coming and will change business forever. The attack on emissions will affect every aspect of society, from how we power our lives and travel to how businesses source, make, distribute, and sell goods. When governments and markets ‘price’ carbon, the cost of everything changes, sometimes by a significant margin.” As Winston notes, some products in their current forms will become much more expensive to make and ship. That makes it imperative, he says, that companies understand exactly what is involved in the manufacturing and distribution of their products.¹⁴

The Carbon Footprint of a Banana

To understand the difficulty in providing a consumer with a meaningful and accurate sustainability label, consider the carbon footprint of a simple banana. Researcher Edgar Blanco, with the Center for Transportation and Logistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was commissioned by Chiquita Brands to determine the impact that distance traveled has on a banana's overall sustainability score.

“Even a simple product like a banana has a complex supply chain: hundreds of farms with different agricultural practices, a variety of trucks and ocean vessels, multiple logistics flows and distances, varying time spent at refrigerated storage, and multiple sources of electricity at stores and warehouses,” Blanco explains. Chiquita's bananas are grown in Central America and are shipped by boat to various US ports, and are then stored in regional warehouses before being shipped on refrigerated trucks to their final retail destination. Naturally, then, a banana sold in a port city like Houston or New Orleans will log many fewer transportation and distribution miles than a banana going to a store in Minneapolis, Chicago, or Kansas City. According to Blanco's research, a banana sold in Minneapolis would have a carbon footprint of 168 g (grams of carbon dioxide equivalent), whereas that very same banana sold in New Orleans would have a much lower carbon footprint of 97 g.¹⁵

But the logistics journey makes up only one element of the total supply chain of the banana. “Even within one well-defined operation, the number of elements you need to measure is very complex in terms of data and interactions with suppliers,” Blanco notes.¹⁶

A carbon footprint, he points out, has three dimensions: depth, referring to how far back or forward in a product's supply chain you choose to measure; breadth, which takes into account what types of data are measured throughout the supply chain; and precision, which is the degree of accuracy in the measurement of carbon emissions. So the plantation field where a banana is grown has to be factored into the equation, as the process of fruit harvesting can contribute as much as 25% of the total carbon footprint of a banana. There's also the fuel efficiency of the various vehicles the bananas are transported in, the energy efficiency of the warehouses they're stored in, and even the cardboard boxes bananas are typically packaged in.¹⁷

Jason Mathers, director of vehicles and freight strategy with the Environmental Defense Fund, offers this example of how a company can reduce its overall carbon emissions by shifting its freight from one transportation mode to another (all things being equal, and the freight still arriving to the customer as scheduled): “A container moved from Shanghai to the port of Seattle and then trucked to Cleveland would have a footprint of 13.1 metric tons of carbon. If that container came into the port of Norfolk instead, its footprint to Cleveland via truck would be 5.6 tons, and via rail it would be 3.5 tons. A move from Seattle via an intermodal mix would result in a footprint of 4.7 tons—less than the truck footprint from Norfolk.”¹⁸

Retail giant Walmart uses a supplier scorecard and what it calls a Sustainability Index to gather and analyze data related to a product's lifecycle, touching on all supply chain points—from sourcing, manufacturing, and transporting, to selling, customer usage, and end of use. Walmart uses the data from the surveys to identify key social and environmental hot spots and to set an agenda as it works with its suppliers to drive continuous improvement. According to the retailer, the Sustainability Index allows suppliers to see their own scores, and how they compare relative to other suppliers. The index also suggests opportunities for improvement for each product category, including tips on how to conduct a product lifecycle analysis (LCA).¹⁹

Don't Reinvent the Wheel

An LCA is actually a stricter standard than a manufacturing emissions–based footprint, points out GreenBiz Group senior analyst John Davies, but it can also open up new revenue opportunities. He cites the example of construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar, which uncovered a multibillion-dollar business opportunity by expanding its remanufacturing capabilities. For instance, while comparing the carbon impact of remanufacturing a cylinder head versus building a new one, Caterpillar discovered that the remanufacturing process consumes 90% less water, uses 80% less energy, requires 99% fewer materials, occupies 99% less landfill, and emits 50% fewer greenhouse gases.²⁰

Air Products and Chemicals, a supplier of atmospheric, process, and specialty gases, uses LCA as a best practice for its CSR initiatives. LCA offers a systemized method to calculate the total environmental cost to manufacture a product, and then offers alternative approaches to production that are more in line with Air Products' sustainability goals. And indeed, by 2019, the company had already achieved most of its 2020 sustainability goals. Some of its recent accomplishments from its “Grow, Conserve, and Care” initiative include: generating more than half (53%) of its revenues from sustainable products, which allowed customers to avoid 69 million metric tons of carbon dioxide; reducing use intensity by 3.7% (from a 2015 baseline) in its air separation units; and reducing its lost time injury rate by 63%.²¹

Corning Painter, CEO of Orion Engineered Carbons and formerly senior vice president, supply chain, corporate strategy and technology at Air Products, recommends that companies use existing standards, such as ISO 14040 and ISO 14044, as their framework for LCA. There's little to be gained, he notes, from trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to sustainability, especially since the ISO already laid the groundwork with its international LCA standards.

“The more all of industry consistently follows these types of best practices, the more credibility we're all going to have,” Painter observes. “If 90% of companies do sustainability well but 10% don't, and if some environmental group finds them out, it will make everybody skeptical of anything that any of us say.” Manufacturers have a good story to tell, he emphasizes. “We just need to be out in front of our sustainability efforts and let people know that we've been doing CSR type of activities for a long time.”²²

One important tool organizations are using to combat human rights violations is technology. Made in a Free World, an antislavery charitable organization whose board includes software executives, has developed a database that can map bills of materials of various products and services, all the way down to the raw materials and labor used throughout a product's lifecycle. Using a supply chain network tool, the solution can triangulate inputs such as supplier performance ratings and payment history to identify situations where forced labor might exist. It can also suggest alternative sources so the user can avoid doing business with questionable suppliers.²³

Similarly, Dun & Bradstreet has developed a Human Trafficking Risk index, which uses proprietary data from D&B's global database of 250 million business records, along with public data from the US government. The index is designed to help companies gain better visibility into their supply chains by analyzing conditions where products are being made or sourced.²⁴

Blockchain technology is being leveraged to create a secure registry for workers to validate a worker's credentials, with the aim of detecting when child labor or forced labor is being exploited. Soft drink giant Coca-Cola and the US State Department are spearheading this project, which aims to identify when forced labor is used to produce sugarcane within Coke's supply chain.²⁵

Bridge Over Muddled Waters

There is a poisonous substance in the world that is so deadly that it takes the life of a child every 19 seconds. In fact, it's so lethal that it kills more people every year than the number of people who die in war or acts of terrorism. The real tragedy is that the same substance that kills so many people is something that we encounter every day and in fact is something we can't live without. It's water.

In the United States as well as most of the industrialized countries of the world, access to clean drinking water is taken for granted. It's just assumed that the municipalities and organizations responsible for a community's drinking supply will ensure that the water is free of impurities. When that turns out not to be the case (consider, for instance, the uproar that resulted when it was learned that the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, had been contaminated with lead), then steps are taken to correct the situation. Clean water is considered one of the inalienable rights of US citizens.

In many other parts of the world, however—namely Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia—the only available water is often contaminated with deadly diseases. Women and children often walk three hours every day to gather this dirty, diseased water, knowing full well it will probably make them sick, but they don't have any other choice.

Consider the average day of an American citizen, and how much water he or she uses in that day: showering, going to the bathroom, washing their hands, making coffee or tea, eating food that needed water to grow, washing clothes, washing dishes, washing the car, going to a swimming pool, watering the lawn. The average American uses 150 gallons of water a day for all their various activities. In comparison, the average family in a developing country is lucky if they can find 5 gallons per day. And if they do find 5 gallons, the water is likely to be unsafe. In fact, one out of every eight people in the world drinks water that will probably make them sick.

All told, almost a billion people in the world don't have easy access to clean water. This, you would think, would be an international tragedy of such epic proportions that it would dominate the news and the many civilized nations would marshal all their resources to ensure that everybody had access to clean, safe water, but for many reasons—some political, some cultural—this global calamity rarely makes the headlines.

That's starting to change, though, due to the rise of an awareness that every company, no matter how big, no matter what industry, has an obligation to leave the planet and its resources in at least as good a condition at the end of the day as it was at the beginning.

Coca-Cola, for instance, set itself a water replenishment goal whereby it would improve water efficiency in its manufacturing operations by 25% by 2020 (using a 2010 baseline). While the company admitted it wouldn't be able to hit that target on schedule in its 2019 Business & Sustainability Report, Coke has already achieved an 18% improvement, stating that it now uses only 1.85 liters of water for every liter of final product (compared to the 2.16 liters of water used in 2010). Coke uses water footprinting, which measures the total volume of water used to produce its products, to gain a clearer idea of its water usage throughout its manufacturing processes and supply chain.²⁶ However, the amount of water that Coke uses in its manufacturing process accounts for only 1% of its total water use, and doesn't include the water used to grow agricultural ingredients sourced by Coke.²⁷

Part of what prompted Coke to set its replenishment goal in the first place, according to the Washington Post, was to overcome the perception that the company was exploiting some of the local communities near its production facilities in India and other countries. The criticism directed at Coke at the time was that the company not only exacerbated water shortages but in some cases contaminated local water supplies.²⁸

If even a multinational giant like Coke has encountered some difficulty in achieving its sustainable water initiatives, what can smaller companies do, especially when many organizations don't have a full-time sustainability manager on staff and, as often happens, the assignment ends up on the supply chain manager's to-do list? Nick Martin, sustainability practice leader at environmental consulting firm Antea Group USA, suggests that companies focus first on what's in their power to manage. At a facility level, for instance, he recommends companies follow what he calls the “4R” approach to optimize their water management:

1. Reduce: Avoid using water where possible by rethinking your processes and/or modifying your products.
2. Reuse: Where is it possible to optimize every drop of water your facility touches through safely reusing water within processes?
3. Recycle: Where can water or wastewater be treated and directed to a beneficial use either on or offsite?
4. Return: To what extent can your facility return water to the local watershed where it was originally sourced from and reduce the overall demand of your operations?²⁹

Eco-Friendly Strategies

Consumers say they want “sustainable products,” but they also want them shipped right away, and the quicker the better, so there's a disconnect in the consumer mind that equates ordering products online with reducing energy consumption. While it's true that fewer consumers traveling to brick-and-mortar stores reduces their personal carbon footprint, transportation is inherently an energy-consuming process, and moving products through warehouses, onto trucks, through cities, and ultimately to homes or offices still uses up a lot of energy. Since trucking companies tend to be singled out more often than not as major contributors to carbon pollution, the EPA has issued numerous regulations over the years with the goal of significantly reducing the amount of carbon emitted from trucks by making the vehicle engines more fuel efficient and cleaner burning.

Parcel delivery companies such as UPS, FedEx, and DHL have all implemented strategies aimed at reducing their energy consumption, and have invested in alternative fuel sources, such as electric- or hydrogen-powered vehicles. UPS, for instance, has set a goal of having 40% of the fuel used by its ground vehicles coming from alternative sources by 2025. FedEx intends to improve efficiency in its Express vehicles by 30% by 2020. And DHL hopes to reduce emissions to zero by 2050.

“Cutting energy costs is the poster child for a quick, sustainable ROI,” says Yossi Sheffi, director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. “Devising ways to become energy-efficient involves activities that benefit the environment and simultaneously cut costs. Whether you replace light bulbs or have fuel-efficient trucks, the ROI happens quickly.”³⁰

As one of the major third-party logistics providers (3PLs) in the United States and manager of a large fleet of its own vehicles, Ryder System Inc. has responded to the call to more sustainable logistics in a number of innovative ways. The company, for instance, has reduced the amount of sulfur emitted from its trucks by switching to ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel at all of its fueling operations; deployed electric vehicles throughout its fleet; and championed the development of electric vehicle charging solutions. Ryder also has worked closely with manufacturers on adopting sustainable designs and processes throughout their supply chains, and offers the following strategies for developing a more environmentally friendly supply chain:

Warehousing and Distribution

• Integrate energy conservation strategies in the warehouse to reduce reliance on GHG-producing sources.
• Set targets for reducing energy consumption and conduct annual audits to ensure progress.
• Use low-voltage lighting and install motion sensors or timers on lighting systems.
• Conduct regular facility inspections to identify opportunities to upgrade the roofing, doors, and windows, and to repair leaking water pipes and irrigation systems.
• Integrate real-time inventory visibility in the warehouse to reduce unnecessary trips and wasteful inventory obsolescence.
• Leverage technology to streamline and improve the accuracy of inventory levels.
• Create a closed-loop system for reporting and reconciling inventory levels with front-office systems.
• Optimize distribution networks to require fewer trips, less idling, and lower overall delivery costs.
• Establish regional distribution centers to serve customers based on demand.
• Optimize and consolidate routes to reduce the number of loads overall.

Transportation

• Align inbound and outbound shipments to reduce carbon emissions with less fuel and to speed up cash-to-cash cycles.
• Connect in real time to customers to synchronize returns with maximized fleet use (i.e., backhauls).
• Coordinate supplier shipments to consolidate freight costs and negotiate better rates.
• Automate transportation management systems.
• Switch to an electronic freight bill, audit, and payment process to reduce or eliminate paper transactions.
• Synchronize with warehouse operations to extend efficiency.
• Consider a dedicated fleet solution.
• Control routes, fuel consumption, and idle time.
• Enhance driver training with courses that improve driving skills and performance, and teach drivers simple techniques to reduce fuel consumption.³¹