Sustainability programs and managing their related data is a challenge manufacturers know they need to address but aren’t quite sure how yet. If your business is in this position, make sure you’re prioritising data management as you build out your strategy. This is essential to ensure that you have the appropriate data capture, governance, and reporting in place to drive accurate reporting and rectification.
Here are three questions you should consider about the data guiding your sustainability efforts:
Is our data accurate?
Think about every action on the shop floor that impacts your carbon footprint — the energy expended to produce a product, the by products and any pollution created during manufacturing, and even the sustainability of the facility’s lighting and any materials handling equipment. Now multiply that impact by the number of your facilities.
That’s a staggering amount of data to manage, and even a slight alteration to your product’s weight or dimensions can significantly alter your footprint. If this data is distributed across your organisation manually, it’s too easy to make an error and end up basing company decisions on inaccurate data sets.
If you’re struggling to keep your product data clean and up to date, it’s likely time to introduce new automation using tools such as product information management (PIM) and master data management (MDM) to ensure data related to your environmental impact is consistent across your organisation. PIM enables users to ensure their product data is up-to-date and consistent within an organisation, while MDM allows for consistency and governance across domains and operational units.
Is our data accessible?
Even if the manufacturing process is a significant source of your company’s carbon footprint, it’s likely not the largest culprit. The Climate Disclosure Project estimates that emissions from a company’s supply chain are on average 5.5x higher than its direct emissions — so delivering your completed goods to stores could very well impact the environment more than actually assembling them.
Reducing these emissions requires collaboration, and lack of accurate data access can be a barrier to an effective partnership. If information such as a product’s carbon footprint is siloed within a programme, only visible to manufacturing leadership, it can be difficult for the broader business to grasp end-to-end supply chain emissions and address the biggest sources.
Solutions such as a master data management platform can help break down these silos, giving executives visibility into all your disparate systems, helping to ensure a consistent “golden record” of data for each item, throughout the enterprise. This simplifies the process of sharing accurate data with partners across your supply chain, such as your transportation providers, for secure collaboration outside your organisation. It can also facilitate more efficient idea exchange on sustainability initiatives across departments, as everyone can reference the same data sets.
Is our data in line with regulations and customer expectations?
While large UK-based organisations have been governed by Streamlined Energy & Carbon Reporting (SECR) regulations since 2019, new requirements on the horizon will make it even more critical for small and mid-size companies to have their emissions data in order. Additionally, the EU is planning to require greater sustainability data transparency through its Digital Product Passport initiative that will apply to most products sold within member countries. This means that manufacturers will have to disclose data related to their products’ sustainability impact so it’s easily accessible to consumers, regulators, and business partners.
Manufacturers should view sustainability not only as a corporate responsibility, but a strategic imperative — enabling them to stand out from competition and meet customer demands for product information sharing now. When companies make it easier to trace a product’s path to the store shelf, they’re better positioned to build and retain customer loyalty.
Data is key to sustainability
At every step of your sustainability efforts, ensure data management is a team priority. Clean, accurate, and accessible data can help you uncover new areas to address, verify the impact of your efforts, and report your emissions to all interested parties. This is how you build a sustainability data strategy that is, in itself, sustainable.
Discover more insights in this new report, Master Data Management for Sustainability.
Ian Rendall, Global SVP Solution Engineering at Syndigo.
Over 30 years, Ian has helped organisations to turn their data into a strategic asset. With real world experience in realising value from complex data challenges and delivering exceptional outcomes.
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