From the readings I expect this week we will discuss product development, supply chain, how businesses are redesigning these processes to be more environmentally sustainable and how to define what sustainable is within various context.
As such this article just hit greenbiz.com tonight about HP's big step forward to be more transparent with their global supply chain.
http://www.greenbiz.com/feature/2008/04/28/transparent-supply-chain-sends-a-clear-message
HP is clear in their actions that this is both a play to open their supply chain to sustainability debates and improvement they are equally clear that they are doing this with the hopes of improving operational efficiency and cost of their global logistics. They are also playing an active role beyond their own CSR by helping to define standards for environmental supply chain management through the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct (EICC). This is analgous to what Whole Foods did with the FDA to define organic standards. I think it's a really good example of social intrapreneurial leadership as defined by Hollender.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Hi Adam, thank you for your post. Sustainability of supply chain is an interesting topic for me as well and i am excited to see it picking up. The article mentions one thing i wanted to emphasize: that sustainability of supply chain goes much beyond "greening" and eliminating waste, but other aspects of buyer-supplier interaction, such as supplier diversity, Code of Conduct and ethics of business relationships. This in turn creates its own set of challenges. For instance, having suppliers comply with EICC standard potentially reduces the ability of smaller companies, or non-US companies to do business with HP or other major companies--I have seen those challenges and controversies while working with IT suppliers at Intel. The article also mentions capability building which i think is a key vector in achieving sustainable procurement practices, which rests on developing long-term relationships with key suppliers and jointly investing in win-win supply chain solutions.
Post a Comment