Supply chain monitoring: Expert exchange on connecting three monitoring domains

29 March 2022

Organisation :

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), ZHAW Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften, ETH Zurich, Global Trade Alert

On 29 March 2022 15:00-17:00 (CET), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Zurich University of Applied Sciences, ETH Zurich, and the Global Trade Alert by the St. Gallen University hosted an online expert exchange among researchers, practitioners, and specialists on the supply chain to discuss the benefits and obstacles of using digital technologies on supply chain risk management and public monitoring.

Experts shared their experiences and insights on current private and public monitoring schemes, describing the current state of play in supply chain monitoring, the digital technologies being applied and the mechanisms used for generating timely insights of environmental risks and environmental impact of supply chains. Additionally, the experts discussed systemic challenges of supply chain monitoring like data generation, collection, processing, and information uptake.

The conversation led to a lively exchange on the future of these monitoring efforts and the potential of digitally connecting environmental monitoring, supply chain traceability and green economy policy transparency.

The experts were:

Chris West (Deputy Centre Director for Research of the Stockholm Environment Institute and researcher at Trase.earth)
Maria Ricart (Sustainable Business Developer and Supply Chain Specialist for Vizzuality and Landgriffon Consortium)
Meike Schröder (Researcher and professor at the Institute of Logistics and Supply Chain Management of the University of Hamburg)
Susanne Katus (VP Brand and Business Development, Corporate Secretary at Datamaran)

Meeting Agenda

15:00 - 15:10	Welcome and introductions
15:10 - 15:45	Scoping supply chain monitoring (SCM)
A short presentation by UNEP (5 minutes) Dive into the SCM (5 minutes per expert) Each participant (5 minutes per expert) will share their understanding of the goals and scope of supply chain monitoring from their own unique perspective. Their interventions will serve as the basis for a common understanding on the relevance and purposes of these monitoring tools. Some guiding questions include: What is the key goal of supply chain monitoring in your field of application? What is the main use of the information? What is the scope of current supply chain monitoring efforts? For supply chain management (or portfolio management), which are the risks considered? (e.g. financial, regulatory, reputational, physical, etc.) For supply chain transparency purposes, what is the focus of their monitoring activities (e.g. survey environmental impact, regulatory compliance, etc.)? To what extent do supply chain monitoring stakeholders have visibility over entire supply chains, including lower-tier suppliers and sub-suppliers, namely in cases of transnational supply chain operations? (Transnational companies, SMEs, governments, NGO’s, etc.) What’s your general observation about the role of digital transformations in supply chain monitoring? Is there a capacity of generating visibility over entire supply chains, including lower-tier suppliers and sub-suppliers, namely in cases of transnational supply chain operations? What’s the capacity of identifying hotspots that might endanger the supply chain resilience or be associated with environmental risks? What’s the capacity of identifying relationships between supply chains or assets with the drivers of negative environmental impact?
15:45 - 16:30	Technology readiness and systemic challenges
Participants will have an open discussion about technology readiness of improving supply chain monitoring for resilience, risk management and for mitigating environmental impact. This discussion takes into account the development and application of technologies from data generation to data analysis, as well as relevant business models. Experts will also be invited to identify bottleneck problems at the systemic level for the scaling up of technology solutions. Participants will have the opportunity beforehand to express their interest to focus on certain questions or raise new questions to peers in the discussion.
Supply chain management Data generation, collection and access Where do stakeholders stand in terms of the generation and collection of operational data with a scale of full life cycle of products at a real-time manner? What are the constraints - a technology feasibility issue, an issue of cost for technology uptake and data management, regulatory concerns or business barriers? What are the emerging business solutions/models for addressing the needs of SMEs? What kind of data is collected or accessed (in this case, from what sources) for understanding the environmental risk and the environmental impact of supply chains? Are there any data quality concerns? What kind of data is collected or accessed (in this case, from what sources) for understanding the risks and impact on local communities? Data processing and data analysis Is supply chain monitoring technology at a stage to offer reliable recommendations for optimizing supply chain operations, taking into account environmental risks and impact? What techniques are used to generate insights on environmental risks for supply chain or assets? What techniques are used to establish the connection between supply chains and environmental impact? For example, can geo- location technologies connect the activities of low-tier suppliers with environmental risks and impact? And how is it possible to isolate other contributing factors to ensure accuracy and reliability of the correlation? Who are the leading tool/service providers for assessing environmental risks and impact of supply chains/assets? Information uptake In your assessment, to what extent business or investment decisions have benefited from digitally enabled supply chain monitoring for risk management and environmental impact mitigation? In light of the growing sustainability reporting requirements by governments, to what extent, digitally enabled supply chain monitoring can support automations in that reporting? Supply chain transparency Data generation, collection and access Where do public stakeholders stand in terms of accessing data in order to generate observatory insights on supply chain structure and for building connection with environmental impact? What are the main challenges? What is the state of play of using big data and machine learning to overcome the problems of data scarcity, data quality and data interoperability? How can the digital transformation in the context of open governmental data help to overcome the problem of data availability and access? Have you seen any viable business models (e.g. public API management) for improving the generation and collection of publicly available data? Do you have examples of voluntary or compulsory disclosure that have in practice served as reliable data sources for assessing environmental impact of supply chains? Are there any data processing challenges? Data processing and data analysis Do you have any examples of public monitoring schemes that offer insights of environmental hotspots areas of individual supply chain? What techniques are used to generate insights on environmental risk for supply chain or assets? What techniques are used to establish the connection between supply chains and environmental impact? For example, can geo- location technologies connect the activities of low-tier suppliers with environmental risks and impact? And how is it possible to isolate other contributing factors to ensure accuracy and reliability of the correlation? Information uptake In your observation, what’s the major media information sources for reporting about the environmental risk and impact of supply chains? Do you have examples of public monitoring results of supply chains that have influenced the decisions of investors or public policymakers?
16:30 - 17:00	The future of supply chain monitoring
Each expert will have 5 minutes to cover one of the following questions. First, the speaker can make a wishlist for technology solutions for addressing a particular methodology or data treatment issue for monitoring supply chains in a specific sector, taking into account data availability. Second, noting the limits of technologies, the expert is invited to outline the necessary elements of a collaborative mechanism for better data access, data sharing, and to enable the uptake of monitoring intelligence. In particular, the speaker could identify areas of collaboration or raise questions to experts of environmental monitoring and experts of green economy policy monitoring.

Key takeaways of the event and areas of convergence:

The discussion converged on the key role of digital technologies for monitoring efforts, allowing the integration of sustainability into decision making, accelerating accountability and improving visibility over complex and indirect supply chains.
Experts emphasized the importance of public data in their line of work and converged on the quality and availability of public data but expressed their concern about the availability of quality data in some places, the lack of standardization, constant changes on data landscape and intense competition from data providers that leads to new products not fit for purpose.
Several experts coincided on the insufficient access to private data and one central point of the discussion focused around overcoming barriers to data sharing through collaboration, multistakeholder partnerships or even through regulation.
Experts recognized the struggle for companies relating to methodology, with some of them sharing a concern over building trust around methodologies, especially when it comes to private sector stakeholders that have their own data.
All experts agreed that the information uptake is driving companies to address the sustainability of supply chains but experts found that this has created new challenges like inconsistencies among datasets, lip service and lack of validation checks, lack of collaboration and funding, and also, challenges on how to use the data for actions that have an impact on the ground.
Experts differed on the associated issues that must be addressed to improve monitoring. For some, the main need is to collaborate, while for others is underpinning data with robust evidence and science, securing funding, standardizing complex data and building capacity of stakeholders (local communities and small enterprises).