Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Data-Driven Supply Chain
84 Plays2 years ago
Our Editor brings together guests across technology, environment, and ethics to discuss how fashion supply chains can balance risk, responsiveness, and responsibility.
This episode is sponsored by Coats Digital. Find out more at www.coatsdigital.com
Featuring:
- Stuart McCready-Stocks
- Mark Dodds
- Sharon Benning-Prince
Listen and subscribe to The Interline Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Follow The Interline on all social channels @TheInterline.
If you would like to get involved in our podcast, email us at [email protected].
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Data-Driven Supply Chains
00:00:05
Speaker
If a brand is really serious about reducing their footprint, there's a really easy solution to that and they don't necessarily need to measure their product footprints, they could just make
00:00:18
Speaker
Welcome to the second episode of the Interline Podcast, the data-driven supply chain. If you're a second time listener, we're glad to have you back. If you're here for the first time, settle in for a frank discussion about technology that's tailor-made for fashion professionals.
Environmental and Ethical Issues in Fashion
00:00:33
Speaker
Now, almost everyone agrees that fashion has environmental and ethical issues. That's an important thing and we need to get out in front of it before this episode really gets underway.
00:00:43
Speaker
We can't argue that fashion brings the right amount of product to market because markdowns and disposal of unsold stock and waste are all routine occurrences. We can't claim the industry has a net positive environmental impact because the statistics say otherwise.
00:01:00
Speaker
Fashion puts out 10% of global carbon emissions and it sucks up enough water annually for 5 million people. And we definitely can't say fashion is an equitable industry because low-cost labour is still at the core of many supply chains. And while sustainability strategies have made progress towards using more renewable materials and trimming carbon footprints,
00:01:23
Speaker
Very few have made real headway on fair wages and wider humanitarian issues. What we can say is that fashion might know the scale of those problems, but it's not necessarily equipped with the right information to solve them. And when it comes to those five and ten year targets, it's hard to set baselines now, and it's going to be harder to measure progress when there's so much that just isn't known and isn't quantified.
Coats Digital Sponsorship
00:01:48
Speaker
And that's what I'm going to talk about in this episode, with the help of three industry experts and with the support of our sponsor for this month, Coats Digital. With its blend of deep industry talent and technology expertise, Coats Digital is building and enhancing the robust, multifaceted ecosystem of best-in-class technologies that empower brands and manufacturers to harness the power of meaningful data and insights, and to then use those insights to solve critical supply chain pain points quickly and seamlessly.
00:02:17
Speaker
making sure that sustainable operational excellence is maintained long-term. You can find out more at CoatsDigital.com, and I was joined for this episode by Stuart McCready-Stokes, who is Coats Digital's commercial director for brands. You're going to hear from the other guests shortly, but first, here's me and Stuart talking about the biggest question in any supply chain conversation, where the fashion has the right data at its fingertips to really understand where the supply chain currently stands post-COVID.
Post-COVID Supply Chain Challenges
00:02:46
Speaker
Let's talk a little bit about where the average supply chain stands right now.
00:02:50
Speaker
and how the relationship between brand and supplier is or isn't recovering from the disruption of the pandemic. And the logical follow-up question from that is how certain we can actually be about how things currently are based on whether you perceive there's a scarcity or an availability of data in the supply chain. Great. I think that's a great question, actually, Ben. And I think there's no getting away from the fact that
00:03:20
Speaker
There is a cold, hard reality here. That cold, hard reality is that the collaboration, the level of visibility between a brand and vendor is far too shallow. And I think we've seen many examples of that, particularly through the pandemic. Brands have historically not been afraid of investing in technology, right? We know that. We also know that what they've really focused on is how to engage their consumer on that front end piece.
00:03:47
Speaker
How do we make sure that we're discussing, we're understanding, we're delivering to the consumer requirements? What they've not focused heavily on, and this is where really the pandemic from my experience with the brands is, they have not spent as much time, energy and money and investment on actually having that level of visibility into the supply chain. And it's really hurt them.
00:04:11
Speaker
And we've seen that, right? So we've seen brands that have had to cancel all of the orders that they have on hand. We've seen the way that they have a real lack of visibility of where the raw materials are coming from in order to deliver against those orders, should we want to reinstigate them.
00:04:28
Speaker
They have no real understanding of what factories have in terms of their ability to be able to produce the product that they want. So, for example, through the pandemic, where we saw some of that demand coming back, having an understanding of which pieces of this supply chain that they could utilize to produce which product categories. And again, where that raw material supply was coming from, et cetera, is just something that they couldn't see. They couldn't see. And because they couldn't see it, they couldn't utilize it. And it hurt them.
00:04:58
Speaker
So I think the reality is, in brief, it's way too shallow. But I think the pandemic has exposed that. And now they're on a journey to really look at which of their suppliers have the relevant technology infrastructure to enable that visibility so that they can now start plugging into it.
00:05:16
Speaker
And what we've seen as part of that is a real rationalization as well. So this, I think a rationalization of supply chain is something that has been going on now for quite some time. And where we've seen this done really well, that collaboration strategic alignment of goals between brand and supply chain is really coming together. However, that's not the case for everybody. But now I think this is really
00:05:39
Speaker
focused their attention to ensure that should they need to be able to deliver, should they need to be able to be as agile as they would like to be utilizing their existing and new supply chain options, the first thing is
00:05:55
Speaker
the brand has to be technically enabled to reach down and have the right level of visibility, but of course the other half of that is how does the supply chain get the digital backbone that it requires to give the brand what it needs to enable that agility that they really require. So I think we've really seen some brands focus on
00:06:17
Speaker
really rationing down that supply chain and ensuring that supply chain has the digital backbone that's required to give them that agility and then a real collaboration between the two of them around how do we now focus that now again some brands here are on a real starting point of this journey and others are way down the road with this but certainly those that are on the starting point which is the ones that were hurt most I've really really focused their attention on
Sustainability in Fashion: Framing the Issues
00:06:47
Speaker
aligning strategic goals, getting collaboration around some of that key fundamental operational level data to help them understand how they can recover as the demand is returning back post-pandemic. My second guest for the show is Mark Dotts, who works as the materials, lifecycle and impact manager for modular menswear brand Lestrange London.
00:07:11
Speaker
The Interline recently ran an interview with one of Lestrange's co-founders, so visit the website to check that out. But for now, here's me asking Mark if fashion might just be framing the issue of sustainability and supply chain insights the wrong way from the outset. So Mark, in any conversation about data, scale is a problem. It's easy to measure and manage a small amount of something in a narrow area of activity.
00:07:38
Speaker
Modern fashion is anything but small and anything but narrow. As you know, output has doubled in the last 15 years, industry-wide to 100 billion units, and variety and speed have become synonymous with success. That means there's a lot of data for fashion as a whole to analyze, and that means there's a very tough base for the industry to start from.
00:08:03
Speaker
Before we get too far down the road of making incremental improvements to the current fashion production model, not that those aren't valuable, should we be having a conversation about why the industry's SKU count has spiraled so out of control to begin with and how we can stop it?
00:08:22
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. I mean, we're lucky at Estrange because our collection is quite small. So in terms of measuring our footprints, it's not been too bad in terms of the amount of data we've needed. But I've worked in a lot of bigger brands in my past life, which have had thousands and thousands of SKUs. And I can't really begin to imagine where they would start. But yeah, the SKU count, spiraling out of control point is so pertinent because you look at the fashion industry these days, it really seems like it's
00:08:52
Speaker
totally out of control and the reason for that is the fashion industry business model pretty much is based on the concept of newness just for the sake of newness. In my previous jobs I've worked for a lot of the bigger brands, the more high street brands and the discussion is always centered around
00:09:12
Speaker
How can we move this product on for next season? And the move on phrase was basically a way of saying, how can we sell this product? How can we change this product slightly so we can sell the same product to the same customer again, basically? And that's how a lot of these brands survive, is by selling ultimately the same thing over and over and over again.
00:09:35
Speaker
And there's rarely any consideration really into whether the customer actually needs that new thing or not. It's more just about making that sale. So in terms of measuring the footprints, I think on the one hand, maybe when you're only making incremental changes to your product line every season, perhaps the footprint is fairly easy to model because once you've done it, you don't need to do it again. You can just make those tweaks.
00:10:02
Speaker
I feel a bit like if we were to legislate the measurement of product footprints in fashion, you know, making sure that fashion brands are obligated to report their product footprints, that could go some way to reducing that whole SKU count question because at the moment there's not really an incentive for brands to reduce their SKU count because ultimately that potentially means less sales.
00:10:26
Speaker
Whereas if you're introducing an administrative burden, administrative cost on having those extra SKUs, then maybe they would think twice about releasing products that they don't necessarily need to release. I think from a strange point of view, what we've thought about quite a lot is
00:10:46
Speaker
the concept of just making less and if a brand is really serious about reducing their footprint, there's a really easy solution to that and they don't necessarily need to measure their product footprints. They could just make less stuff and just in that one action, they know that they're reducing their footprint without actually having done any of that data analysis. That could be the good first starting point for a lot of these bigger brands, I think.
00:11:14
Speaker
My final guest this episode is Sharon Benning-Prince. She's a corporate and commercial lawyer, human rights advocate, and supply chain transparency professional, who's also the founder of Justice and Fashion, which is an organisation that works to promote worker rights here in the UK and overseas. And this is me talking to Sharon about how the industry is recovering from COVID from a humanitarian point
Humanitarian Impacts on Supply Chains
00:11:37
Speaker
of view.
00:11:37
Speaker
How is the human side of the fashion supply chain reshaping now that the world's starting to recover from COVID and doing it in a deeply unequal way? It seems to me there's a pretty clear opportunity to do things differently and an equally clear mandate for change from consumers and regulators, but from a humanitarian perspective,
00:11:59
Speaker
How much is really being benchmarked right now, industry-wide, and taking account of what we do and don't know? How can progress be measured, documented, and sooner rather than later? How can it be enforced? So for us, the reason we came to a conclusion, and we've done quite a few research projects with some other organisations to actually identify very much that point, had it in fact got worse, we assumed the worst.
00:12:30
Speaker
But what we did actually see, and of course I think this is very common knowledge now, is that a number of brands changed payment periods, payment terms. They unilaterally started to change contractual provisions. They invoked certain clauses within agreements. And I will caveat by saying agreements, which probably are very one-sided,
00:12:54
Speaker
And again, I know this, having been in the legal department of a number of fashion brands, that ultimately it's easy for a big brand to wield a stick and say, this is the agreement you will enter into.
00:13:11
Speaker
And also to kind of pat it, and I'm being slightly cynical here, but pat itself on the back by saying, well, we have swathes of codes of practice. We have swathes of policies that we then push down to our suppliers. And in doing so, it must mean thus that they are also adhering to that and everything is fine. My cynicism, of course, is that's actually not the case. And it isn't in position. It's not a
00:13:41
Speaker
There's never really an equal bargaining platform or there hasn't been between suppliers and brands. And so what we did see.
00:13:49
Speaker
as the upshot of COVID occurring, the world slowing down, lockdown, et cetera. Of course, it seemed that shops were closing, there wasn't that need or desire or demand for clothing. And typical high street brands suddenly went, right, what's going on here? We've got all this stock that we now can't move.
00:14:16
Speaker
We've got a lot of money that's owed to suppliers. So what seems the most reasonable thing to do? And for those who understand the legality of a force majeure provision, a number of brands did invoke a force majeure provision in something beyond our control. There's nothing we can do about it. And therefore, a number of suppliers were left high and dry with stock
00:14:41
Speaker
that had been committed to brands, outstanding payments owed to them. And ultimately, it was the worker that suffered from that. It was the worker who was at a loss financially.
00:15:01
Speaker
We've established that there's a lot that fashion needs to get better at measuring and managing, but if you're a brand new retailer, where specifically should you start?
00:15:12
Speaker
That's a question I put to Mark. I know Lestrange is targeting climate positivity, where you offset more carbon than you admit, but there's a great deal of information that needs to be gathered to inform that calculus across a complex set of variables like materials, waste, packaging, shipping, and so on. If the industry as a whole is going to move in that direction towards positivity, what are some of the non-negotiable things that a brand
00:15:42
Speaker
needs to be able to not just know about the impact of their individual products, but to be able to prove.
00:15:49
Speaker
Yeah, this is a tricky one because depending on the size of the brand and where they are at in their life cycle, you're going to get a different answer. With Lestrange, the last year or so, we've put a lot of effort into measuring all our product footprints in as much detail as possible. We're reporting CO2, water use, fossil fuel use, chemicals and eutrophication, which is
00:16:14
Speaker
issues water courses when there's too much nitrogen so that's about farming practices and stuff like that and in order to get to those metrics we've been using an industry tool called the HIG platform and that is super detailed so we've been lucky in the sense of because we're quite small we've been able to get quite a lot of rich data around our supply chain you know our supply chain is fairly compact and consolidated so it hasn't been that hard to get
00:16:42
Speaker
much of the information as we need so we are measuring everything from the raw material production all the way through the manufacturing the packaging the end of use how the customer washes it and even how they dispose of it and that's what we've that's how we've come to our product footprint so I feel quite confident now that
00:17:02
Speaker
our footprints are as robust as they possibly can be today. In terms of non-negotiable things, I think it will be a different answer for different brands, but from my point of view, I think that the main thing with reporting this kind of data is having transparency of your supply chain. I think that's
00:17:24
Speaker
that must be non-negotiable because if you're filling out a platform such as the HIC platform, which requires an inordinate amount of data about your product and how it's put together, how the fabric is produced, how it's dyed and finished and all this kind of stuff, I don't see how a brand could fill out that information properly unless they know their supply chain. And having worked in a lot of brands, there is loads of effort going into
00:17:54
Speaker
mapping supply chains and all of this but quite often big retailers and brands have there's normally a stakeholder between them and their supply chain so there'll be a third-party company that's handling their production and they like to keep a lot of the upstream supply information private because
00:18:15
Speaker
brands sometimes might take that information and go direct or whatever.
Transparency and Data Collection Needs
00:18:20
Speaker
So there's valid reasons why a company might protect that information but while they do protect that information I don't see how the brand could ever measure their footprint properly because they don't have the visibility of
00:18:34
Speaker
even basic things like necessarily where the product is, which countries the product is hitting and the journey it takes. With our footprints, we're even mapping the product journey. So we know that the raw material, let's say it's wool from Australia and it's going to Turkey to be produced into yarn and then it's coming to Europe to be woven into fabric. So we can plot that journey and include those distances on a ship or on a truck or whatever into our footprint.
00:19:03
Speaker
And without the transparency of your supply chain, how can you do that? So I think for me, that's the most important thing from a non-negotiable. And once you've got that, it does start to make life a lot easier. You can talk to each of the stakeholders in your supply chain and get the primary data, which is the key thing. I think without having transparency, you're never going to get that primary data.
00:19:32
Speaker
Now, as we've just seen, a big part of creating a supply chain that runs on and is reinforced by data is knowing what data to collect. But once you have it, how do you then start to derive insights from it? And how critical is it to have a real presence in the supply chain in order to build those insights? Here's me and Stuart discussing exactly that.
00:19:56
Speaker
Having insights that you as a brand can act on, it requires you to not just better aggregate data that already exists, but to actually gather new information at the source. And that source might be in dying operations, it might be in sewing operations, it might be in shipping and logistics. And built into that question is the realization that
00:20:21
Speaker
There are visibility gaps, often quite big ones, in the supply chain between design and production. Those are visibility gaps that companies who are already present and well-positioned in the supply chain are maybe the ones that are in the right place to plug.
00:20:37
Speaker
So, whether we're talking about factory capacity, emissions, operational efficiency, labour quantification, what's your take on how fashion can start building a clearer picture based on that gathering that new data of what have historically been quite remote, arms-length relationships? I think there are two schools of thoughts on this.
00:21:00
Speaker
I come from an era where best in breed technologies was the standard approach. If I think about how we have worked with brands and supply chain partners, historically, we have taken a narrow scope approach to a particular key process that we want to optimize to enable
00:21:19
Speaker
to connect it and accelerate it. We've built best in breed technologies and we have a range of those right from design through development through getting something directly to the consumer. There is always and we see the seeds of best in breed technologies through that end-to-end lifecycle or what I call plan to pack and actually
00:21:42
Speaker
As much as that's been really great in identifying and being able to help us understand for that particular scope, which is potentially quite narrow but deep, how to optimize, how to get the data that we need to feed into the decision making process for that particular piece of the process, that's been great.
00:22:01
Speaker
However, it's also fed into actually creating silos of data. Data is king is something that I've grown up with. For the generations below us, for them, it's all about the information that they have.
00:22:17
Speaker
within touch reach, you know, everything's there. The reality is actually, I think that's only part of the piece, right? Data, having that data is really key. And I think the best in pre-technology approach that we have seen has worked. It's enabled us to make decisions around those particular processes. But now what we need to do is we need to start
00:22:37
Speaker
widening the horizon here and starting to think much more holistically about this. So this is not just about how do I look at a particular part of a process, get that data collected to be able to make the right decisions for that particular element, but it's about how now we start to support the brands and its supply chain partners.
00:22:58
Speaker
in identifying the power of the data that they have within those particular best in breed technologies and how we surface them correctly at the right time, analyze them against the data points that we needed prior. If we think about some of these things that we talked about, those post-production costings, those post-production
00:23:18
Speaker
tech packs that we're doing, write the theory behind prior to the execution. It's then about analyzing that data at the right time, in the right place, against the other benchmarks that we need to, and delivering it to the people that can really make a decision that we need to change how this works. That for me is the real problem of the industry today. I think if you speak to anybody, the thing that they have the most of is data.
00:23:47
Speaker
What they're really struggling to do is understand which pieces of data to use at the right time, how to surface them. And that's where people like us and where I think we as technology providers to the industry need to get better at supporting the brands and the supply chain.
00:24:06
Speaker
There's a real challenge here, though, Ed, right? And that challenge is that that relies on that data being shared across the end-to-end lifecycle. And historically, we know brand and vendor relationships around that true level of visibility is weak. There's a wall that people like you and I, Ben, are trying to fight every day where we're saying, this wall needs to come down. The only way we can really achieve these real strategic goals is by having that full level of visibility, trust, and transparency. And that's still not there.
00:24:36
Speaker
So that's something that we need to get over. When it comes to sustainability strategies, the environment is often overrepresented when it's compared to the ethical side of the equation for a simple reason. It's a much harder subject to unpick and it can be difficult to know where to really start. I asked Sharon for her take.
00:25:00
Speaker
Now, how do you believe the fashion industry can make the biggest impact in the shortest time on the inequality that sits at the heart of some of these longstanding humanitarian issues that fashion has? Well, for me, there are two things. I think one is brands looking and taking responsibility for their purchasing practices and their supply chains.
00:25:27
Speaker
I think it's very easy to say, and brands do say this, but I think actually there are now examples where this refutes this argument, but a lot of brands will say our supply chains are very complex, hence why we cannot always have the full transparency or scrutiny. But actually I think now what we are seeing is an emergence, and I think they've always been there, but suddenly they're more so, of smaller brands
00:25:55
Speaker
and even mid-sized brands that are coming out and showing us that actually supply chains can be more compressed, but you can have greater transparency, that it doesn't need to be this web of complexity of multiple tiers. And I think equally from a legal perspective and as a lawyer, I think what we are now starting to see are several things.
00:26:20
Speaker
You have the mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence legislation that is being pushed through that, you know, multiple brands have sort of said actually should be in place as have numerous NGOs. But I think equally there are now, and we can come up missing from the States, there are now initiatives to push things like model contract clauses.
00:26:48
Speaker
which has actually been a reaction to the fact that actually legal provisions were very one-sided. And so, you know, we're seeing, and I can see this from the American Bar Association, that they are now pushing some of these model provisions that allow more equity for the suppliers and actually
00:27:12
Speaker
are imposing upon brands a greater responsibility of seeing how their actions and their general business model impacts their workers and actually then articulating them in legal provision. Now, as you and I both know, legal agreements are legal agreements and they can be rigorously negotiated and written
00:27:38
Speaker
and not always enforced. And I think it's difficult to say where you have even the most stringent of agreements would a supplier actually enforce it against a brand. But we are starting to see more common forums that are coming together of suppliers. I'm thinking about Asia at the moment.
00:28:05
Speaker
that are trying to ensure that something like the model contract clauses, and I'm not thinking very much of the US ones, but something equivalent to that, are actually going to be put into agreements so that they can actually have a greater
00:28:24
Speaker
I suppose a great sense of power to enforce.
Equitable Supplier Relationships
00:28:29
Speaker
And equally I can see, you know, and I'm bringing it back home now to Leicester, for example, because of course we've had in the public eye, a numerous publicity of a certain online brand. And from my sort of inner knowledge of what is going on in Leicester,
00:28:50
Speaker
there is a change of foot. There is this impetus of having greater supplier power, of more suppliers coming together so that they have a more common voice. My only caveat to that is, and I think this is an important thing to think about, and I think you've already sort of touched upon it,
00:29:13
Speaker
Even here in the UK, there are still cultural nuances, and I'm thinking of Leicester here as an example, but there are still cultural nuances that have played a part in the way wages are paid, things are run and so forth.
00:29:33
Speaker
One is not only looking at giving the supplier a greater voice and therefore the workers, but I think it's also understanding some of those nuances as to why these situations have arisen in the first place.
00:29:48
Speaker
I think that's a really great point. I think it straddles a fine line between the sort of edict level approach to supply chain relationships, if you can call it that, and the one based on codes of practice, as you said, and the one that's based more on
00:30:07
Speaker
a blend of objectivity and subjectivity, I suppose, one that's built on the right data, but that also takes account of the, as you rightly put it, the nuances in how different cultures operate, the nuances in how different relationships operate. So I guess a way to bring it home to wrap this up would be to say that there isn't necessarily a single approach to fixing this problem. But I think it's probably fair to say
00:30:36
Speaker
There is a common approach to unpicking this problem, which is to actually look into it, to actually investigate it. Without that first-hand knowledge of what your own supply chain as a brand looks like, it doesn't matter whether you're solving it in a very unique way or you're solving it in a way that has a lot of commonality with the way that other brands work. You're still going to need to know what you perhaps currently don't know.
00:31:02
Speaker
Gathering the right data and building insights from it is, of course, only part of the picture. Both inside and outside the walls of brand HQ, there's a lot of interested parties who each need to be communicated with in different ways using that data. This is something Lestrange has been actively working on, so I quiz Mark about it.
00:31:25
Speaker
Now, Mark, another key consideration when it comes to supply chain data is governance and communication. So once you have information, say emissions data, how do you make it usable and useful to the widest possible audience inside your organization and across your supplier base? But also how do you communicate it outwardly in a way that empowers consumers to make choices, informed choices that align with their values?
00:31:56
Speaker
Yeah so I'd say this is our challenge for the coming year really 2022 because we've spent much of 2021 gathering the data and getting the transparency of our supply chain and I feel like we're in a really great place now in terms of having that data to look at but the communication piece is
00:32:14
Speaker
the next challenge, and like you say, it's how do we get that out there in an interesting and engaging way. Within Lestrange, as in our team, we're a small team, they're all really engaged in all this kind of stuff, so I don't feel that that's a problem because there's already an inherent understanding in the Lestrange team of what this data means.
00:32:35
Speaker
and how to interpret it so we're not so worried about that side of it. The suppliers would be the same as well just because within the textile industry specifically there is such a microscope on everyone at the moment with regards to this kind of thing so
00:32:51
Speaker
the supply base generally are measuring their own impacts and they're supplying emissions data to various legal organizations so communicating to them as well I don't feel is a big challenge but the customer question is a real interesting one because the data as you know is it's pretty dry you know the data we get out is from an emissions point of view is very dry and it's
00:33:17
Speaker
And it's also, it's not necessarily looking at areas that people are that familiar with. I mentioned the term eutrophication earlier, which is from a textile point of view is a really important metric to measure but
00:33:32
Speaker
there's no way really of getting that across to a typical consumer that doesn't know about farming and almost I feel like there's no point necessarily talking about that aspect of it because without context they're just not going to understand it. But with the CO2 questions a little bit easier and I feel like
00:33:53
Speaker
Is our job really to contextualize these figures into the customer's life and their lifestyle? Carbon's a little bit easier because everyone really has heard of a carbon footprint. We all understand about carbon credits and carbon budgets these days, so that's a little bit easier to get across.
00:34:13
Speaker
But I think the key thing is contextualising it into our customers' life and their everyday behaviours. That's how we can potentially influence consumer behaviour change, which is also a key thing that we need to do. Obviously, as a brand and a company, it's our job to reduce our impact as much as possible.
00:34:33
Speaker
Most of the impact of a product generally lies in the use phase, so it is about influencing customer behavior as well, and so contextualizing it into their life is a really important thing. I look at recycling as a good example of this because recycling as well is a very dry subject. It's not particularly interesting to talk about recycling or understand what's happening, but
00:34:55
Speaker
people, myself included, we can visualize what a landfill site looks like and we can visualize how big our bin is, you know, and we put it out every week so by making changes to our recycling behaviour I can physically see how much stuff I'm throwing out and how much is going into the recycling bin and I feel like that being able to visualize it in that way and see it in our everyday lives that
00:35:19
Speaker
means that people, they're just much more likely to change their behavior. And with recycling, I think we've seen that. Everyone I know recycles as much as possible now, I think, because we can see what potentially the damage could be done by not recycling. And we need to kind of try and do a similar thing.
00:35:39
Speaker
with emissions as well and whether it's relating your Garmin CO2 footprint to something relatable such as driving X amount of miles in a car or you know saying okay well you took all the data Spain last year that was the equivalent of let's say I don't know buying for argument say 50 pairs of trousers or whatever so when you start to frame it like that I think maybe at that point the customer might try they might be able to understand more
00:36:07
Speaker
or just in a more relatable way, the impacts of their clothing choices specifically. Because I think when people are consuming goods at the moment, they don't have... That's not at the forefront of their mind is what's the carbon footprint of this pair of trousers. But maybe with a cultural shift, we can start getting people to think in that way. We're spending a hundred pounds on a pair of trousers and we're also spending seven kgs of CO2 for argument's sake.
00:36:36
Speaker
So yeah, contextualizing it somehow into some kind of physical ways is the way forward. But we've not quite decided, I think, what our approach is going to be for this year. It's still a work in progress.
00:36:50
Speaker
We've talked about a lot of different data sources and different data applications in this episode. So rather than dwell on the work that still needs to be done, I wanted to end by painting a picture of what an ideal future supply chain built on data should look like.
Future of Data-Driven Supply Chains
00:37:05
Speaker
And I enlisted Stuart to help me.
00:37:09
Speaker
Stuart, to bring us to a close, what do you think the supply chain of the future looks like? Obviously, resilience and risk mitigation is a huge concern, especially in light of what's happening right now out in the world. If we jump ahead to a time where, let's say, every brand and every supplier is equipped with a treasure trove of actionable data,
00:37:30
Speaker
What does that future supply chain look like, where they're making use of that data to become more agile, more profitable, to have a more secure and a more transparent relationship?
00:37:43
Speaker
Great question, Ben. I think there is no one easy answer to this, is what I think. If I come back to, ultimately, supply chains are there to deliver against the demand of the brand, which is actually there to deliver against the demand of the consumer.
00:38:01
Speaker
brands have a wealth of equity to them. They've got a long-standing consumer base that really understand and feel what that brand requires, which means that the supply chain that that brand is ultimately building has to deliver against the demand of that particular brand and its associated consumer base.
00:38:23
Speaker
So I think there's no one answer. What I do think is that there's some prerequisites to however this works. Those prerequisites are that the end-to-end lifecycle, the plan to pack lifecycle has to be digitized. Without that digitization, there is no way to be able to pull out the insights that we need to support the brand, to support the supply chain, to ultimately give the consumer what they're asking for from this here. And their expectations are not going, you know, they're not getting smaller, they're getting larger.
00:38:52
Speaker
So that's the prerequisite. Everything has to be digitized. I think what we then need to be able to do is help them understand what parts of that, what elements of those data needs to be exposed, where, how and how do we use it. So it's an education. So it's a digital backbone of infrastructure that allows us to be able to give us the visibility that we need.
00:39:14
Speaker
It's the ability to be able to surface that in a way that we can then translate into something meaningful. And when I talk about meaningful, I talk about the three P's, the people, the planet, and the performance. And I think we've been so focused on performance when we've talked about technology in the supply chain historically. The reality is today that without considering those people, planet, and performance elements of it, we need to have that data insight coming through.
00:39:42
Speaker
And I think the other thing that we need to do here is we need to have an industry that is starting to understand that we need to share. And when I talk about share, I don't just mean data, I mean sharing of best practices, where we see supply chains that work or supplies that work for brands that do this really well. If, for example, a vendor finds a new way of working, which is
00:40:08
Speaker
ultimately delivering against one of those three P's. The best thing that they do with that is share that information. They help their competitors supply that brand in a better way because it's the right thing to do for either the people or the planet or the performance element of this. So that for me is then where it really kind of hinges. We need to be able to digitize end to end.
00:40:32
Speaker
We need to know where to surface and then we need to be able to share across the supply chain. And ultimately that for me means that we need to be able to build a culture which is different to what we have today and it starts with people like you and I, Ben. And that brings us to the end of our second full-length episode. On behalf of the entire team here at The Interline, thanks for joining us.
00:40:55
Speaker
whether this is your first time, or whether you've made space in your life to become a regular listener. There's a lot happening in the world right now, and the Interline's got a bunch of different takes on current events from multiple angles, so as always, we'd love you to bookmark the website and follow us, or me, or both, on LinkedIn to stay engaged between episodes.
00:41:15
Speaker
And don't forget to follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and you'll be notified when our next episode, Championing Change, is released in early April. If you think the content of this episode will be useful for a colleague, but they might prefer a more condensed version, look for the distilled version of this episode in a couple of weeks' time, which will pack all the key insights into half the listening time. I'd also like to thank our sponsor for this episode, Coats Digital, again.
00:41:44
Speaker
across its core strategic pillars of talent, digital, innovation and sustainability. Coats Digital's ecosystem of connected technologies is helping brands, retailers and suppliers, businesses like yours, to digitally transform over the long run.
00:41:59
Speaker
And building on all the themes we've talked about in this episode, Coats Digital is working with both new and existing customers to help them improve agility and speed to market, realise a whole raft of efficiencies, and secure real-world insights that will ultimately strengthen and future-proof their businesses at the same time. You can find out more at CoatsDigital.com