Global luxury beauty and cosmetics business

IT is a critical enabler of sustainability goals

The GSC IT organization recognized that it was a critical enabler of GSC’s sustainability goals. However, it lacked a clear, cohesive and compelling articulation of its current contribution and how the organization could grow it. Consequently, it struggled to inform and inspire the wider business – or to provide a clear strategic direction to its own people with regard to sustainability.

Berkeley’s significant sustainability experience, both in similar sectors and more broadly, combined with a strong track record of delivery in other high-profile roles at the client, led to GSC IT leadership team asking us to help.

Shining a light on supply chain IT’s existing sustainability achievements

We began by assessing current sustainability contribution and external best practice, and identified that IT was already making a material impact on supply chain sustainability. For example, applying data and analytics could identify production issues more quickly and thereby reduce energy and materials consumption. Process automation was reducing waste, while applying business insight to improve the design of the supply chain network was reducing transportation.

However, because sustainability was not yet fully embedded in scorecard and performance management, these contributions were typically delivered as side benefits. There was no comprehensive tracking, communication or celebration of sustainability achievements.

To address this, we defined five key ways in which IT can accelerate delivery of sustainability ambitions – and highlighted what the client was already doing in each of these areas:

Defining the future strategic direction on sustainability for supply chain IT

Having articulated the current contribution, we defined maturity models for each of the five key ways IT can contribute to sustainability – and assessed current maturity levels for GSC IT.

Using this as a base, we worked with the client to agree the way forward in three areas:

• Build foundations. For example, better embed sustainability into metrics, measurement and data ‘DNA’ – and into governance and decision-making processes. 
• Pursue quick wins. For example, extend existing capabilities to increase contribution, introducing basic gamification to motivate behavior change.
• Create strategic capabilities. Invest in more strategic capabilities to move up the maturity levels, in areas such as IoT and telematics, more sophisticated analytics (e.g. condition monitoring and predictive maintenance), use of AR and VR to further reduce travel for more technical roles, etc.

Changing supply chain IT governance to make sustainability core to future priority-setting and decision-making

A key part of foundation-building involved supporting the client to reframe current governance and decision-making processes to take sustainability into account. This ranged from generating and prioritizing opportunities and ideas for sustainability improvement, to capturing and quantifying the benefits (e.g. CO2 emissions and carbon pricing), to benefits realization.

As part of this work, we identified and suggested improvements to existing sustainability objectives, metrics and measurement, bringing them in line with best practice.

Building the right sustainability skills and expertise within supply chain IT

We actively helped to build capability and understanding with regard to sustainability within the client team. This included: building an understanding of the importance and urgency of the sustainability imperative; an awareness of the key aspects and drivers of sustainability; and an understanding of how to define, quantify and measure objectives and achievements.

Following our work together, GSC IT were in a much stronger position to confidently articulate the contribution IT can make and is already making to corporate sustainability goals – and to increase and accelerate that contribution.