The responsible production and supply chains of the future

This article is part of the “The road to sustainability” weekly newsletter on Linkedin. This newsletter is an initiative by Nevelab Technologies - Every week, covering approaches and strategies to plan sustainability.

This edition was first published on October 18, 2020, going to 2,650+ subscribers and counting. You can receive this newsletter in your inbox with an exclusive column and more analysis by subscribing here.

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In the years ahead, we have a historic opportunity to fundamentally nurture social initiatives, “not just to manage or contain global issues” but to actually achieve key improvements in the welfare of humankind. At a time when countries are boldly confronting all manner of stubborn social challenges - and despite the fact that the crisis continues, capital is not necessarily flowing toward what efficiently works, patterns and workflows have been disrupted and organizations are facing their own internal chaos - the social sector has widely demonstrated its capacity to magnify its values.

Leaders must understand that collaboration, adaptability, governance, resilience, diversity, inclusion, and ethics, to name just a few, are of the most imperative components of a sustainable, or more precisely, purpose-driven ecosystem and need to start operating in a regenerative mode and design new contexts.

More importantly, the pandemic has forced nearly every business to reconsider how to deliver their transformation agenda in the new normal. Customers and employees have become much more environmentally conscious while organizations are looking for solutions to adapt to new ways of producing better as they pivot from old patterns of work to new ways of working.

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Article summary: in recent years - and especially in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic - from Asia to America via Africa, a meaningful number of multinational corporations have pledged to work only with supply organizations that adhere to social and environmental standards. The urgency with which companies need to adopt a change mindset during times of transformation cannot be downplayed. Respond to service disruption with adaptive, dynamic, and innovative processes require heavy foundations and deepen collaboration with local social enterprises.

We believe that data management and disruptive technologies will inevitably ameliorate at fast pace processes, ideas proliferate, experiments multiply, and results in scale.

This article is a preview of session 2 of The road to sustainability webinar series. You are invited to participate in the related session: Monday, October 26, join us: impact.nevelab.com

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Data management for purpose-driven ecosystems

Committing to a new operating model requires an agile methodology and prioritize innovative approaches, too often led from the top and most organizations cannot proceed with agile pilots forever. Many become resentful when agile teams make decisions and progress more swiftly as they deploy new concepts and receive resources that might otherwise be dedicated to more traditional business-as-usual initiatives. (ref. see original publication).

This, especially when there is an urgent need to balance optimal delivery during a downturn: the ability to absorb shocks from unforeseen events and the capacity to benefit from new opportunities occurring in the surrounding environments requires the modification and tuning of internal processes coupled to the evolving workflows based on the changing state.

The imperative is to conceive operational models based on a foundation that fully integrates agile methods and practices, enhanced with AI, open-source cloud infrastructure, automation, and interconnected digital knowledge platforms and processes.

Too often, business processes are developed at the strategic level but are never identified precisely in logistics: a dynamic model that articulates how internal processes could remain operational and enable employees and stakeholders with the necessary technical foundation and tools needs to be embedded.

To start by setting up responsible production chains, it is essential to deploy solutions capable to operate and incorporate sustainable tools as integral parts of their corporate and business strategies and be fully inherent to their logistics: traditional emphasis on in-depth analytics is not enough anymore. It is also essential to leverage strategic insight, and the innovative application of digital technologies to magnify the impact of the social impact brought by the changing environment.

We will address the proposition on three different levels: the "process" level to process the digital transformation for an operational infrastructure, the "discipline" level to achieve a guaranteed level of integrity, and the "meta"-level associated with transparency on provenance enabled by improved data management.

Digital transformation for an operational infrastructure

Urbanization and population growth will continue to create new challenges in the distribution of goods over “the last mile” in our crowded megacities. This brings a more complex perspective on production, logistics, and supply management: we need to rethink assumptions for the sustainability era. The ability to embed digital transformation in the production and supply sectors has been disrupted because current delivery models do not accommodate a distributed and virtual workforce. Service delivery models need to be reconceived to allow businesses to achieve their transformation objectives and this, in a full open-source managed ecosystem that could. Diversify as much as possible the environment to better communicate with social initiatives, and align values to deepen the intersection of open source management, logistic challenges, and maximize collaboration with local social enterprises.

Today the need to implement new capabilities across the technology stack to enable these social enterprises to help organizations drive digital resilience and transformation is no more an option. As current trends indicate that social enterprises are becoming more economically focused, and less sensitive to the cultural and social processes it is crystal clear that blended models will take over the existing institutional mechanisms which are hierarchical and centralized: constraining global mechanisms like supply chains, production lines amongst many to be fully immobilized in times of crisis prevents next-generation applications to unlock the power of open innovation and purpose-driven approaches. (ref. see original publication).

Integrity guaranteed

Given the increasing complexity of supplying to businesses and shipping out products in an increasingly globalized supply chain, the scope of integrity widens to the business processes level rather than just the functional level. Those involved in production and logistics understand that supply chain operations have the tendency to expand as well as engaged in many supply chain management activities and responsibilities.

Within the context of varying supply chain environments, guaranteeing total integrity can be difficult. Corporate strategic objectives must be compatible as well as aligned with logistics. Production and supply capabilities have been well acknowledged for the most important contributions to overall corporate strategy and performance. All this information should be available and accessible within public networks.

This is essentially the form of understanding necessary to strengthen further the importance of integration in supply chains so that employees can sustain remote work at scale and businesses can pursue their transformations with confidence, speed, and resilience in shifting business conditions. Moreover, this should be the ultimate focus on motivating and empowering employees, inspirational virtual leadership, flexible and available expertise, but also encourage stakeholders to stress the open collaboration and value consistent processes.

Transparency on provenance

Data and information underpin the ability of economic actors to drive change in business priorities and practices. Greater transparency and insight allow consumers, companies, investors, and governments to change the way they buy, produce, sell, transport, consume, and govern, which, in turn, has the potential to transform the way economies operate. A pervasive challenge in greater production and logistic lines is a lack of transparency. There's a tremendous opportunity to create an open data environment that can be infused into business processes and decision making and drive improved environmental outcomes.

This article is a preview of session 2 of The road to sustainability webinar series. You are invited to participate in our upcoming sessions every Monday, join us: impact.nevelab.com

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The Nevelab's Vault: Community and tools for social enterprises

We've just launched a new space for founders, innovators, and social entrepreneurs to help them with their social enterprise: Nevelab's Vault on Substack.

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Disclosure

The road to sustainability is an initiative by Nevelab Technologies.

Nevelab is a purpose-driven platform that leverages artificial intelligence to provide organizations with the tools to integrate sustainable imperatives while generating actionable insights.