>> I'm Michael Harper. I started in engineering. I went to Colorado School of Mines, had a Bachelor of Science in Geophysical Engineering. And then I went in the military and I was a corp of engineers. My terminal degree and PhD is in operations research from RPI in Troy, New York. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. And then after that, I got a job at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Then I went into oil shell, and there's where I started going to energy. And then I went to academia. And then I just, I gravitated to business school. I taught in math, and statistics in Mines, and project management, but then I moved into business, then I stayed there. And so, that's where I'm at now. >> That's great work. Glad that you're at CU Denver. >> Thank you. >> Your expertise at the university is in supply chains, and you have a good understanding of how sustainability links into supply chain, and could you first of all talk about what is supply chain, and then go into how sustainability fits into supply chain. >> A supply chain is a network of activities, and facilities that provide good, and services to the customer from the supplier through the manufacturer the distributor, wholesaler, retailer. And it does so from the very beginning to the end. But it's also a network of information of knowledge, of people, of money. The first is sustainability concern. There's a lot of places and supply chain where sustainability will impact upstream to the supplier. It's the supplier practices ,and the supplier practices with their energy use with their labor practices, downstream you can have product design, downstream if the product is poorly designed, you'll have waste, you'll have doesn't use energy well. And if it breaks in the hand of the consumer, you'll have recalls, and returns, and that's very costly. And so, within the organization itself and the manufacturing, or distributor it's how they run operations. It's how the energy use. And the efficient use of people. Efficient use of your resources that you do have, and the energy use. So, sustainability is important from the beginning to the end. And it affects the economics, it affects the environment, and it affects the people. >> Great, thank you. What are some approaches companies are taking to address sustainability along the supply chain? >> The larger companies that have the most benefit and also more progressive. One guiding principle they have is measurement, accountability, transparency and communication. All of them that are making progress, say, that we have to measure. It can improve thing unless you measure them, and as you measure them then you can see identify where you need to improve. And so, a lot of the things that people are doing is measuring for the purpose of accountability. Upstream for the supplier, they will be looking at different indices, like a sustainability index, or score cards. And those score cards will involve metrics that look at carbon emission, that look at energy usage, that look at waste, that look at returns, that look at practices on the environment side and the economic side. On the human resource side and the sociopolitical side, they'll look at how they treat their employees, and how they interact with their communities. So, one area is looking at the metrics and accountability. And seeing where they are. And there's a lot of examples where, when they began measuring, they didn't realize places where they were so wasteful. Like energy usage within heating their buildings, or the water usage that it was very inefficient on how they used water when they water their crops on the farming side. And so, as they begin to measure, they begin to realize areas where they have to increase, but that was for accountability. And that's where the accountability comes, the score cards and the measurement. As far as the transparency is concerned the more you're transparent, the more you become accountable. And the more transparent you are, the more you realize, from other sources, places that you have to improve. And there's where communication comes. The communication is helping each other get better once you see what needs to be done. And so, a lot of what companies are doing today is measuring for accountability, and being transparent up, and down the supply chain, and also communicating to help each other get better. So, it's more of a community. >> Do they do any third part verification? In accounting we have a lot of those where we get our confidence. >> Yes, they do. And a lot of the verification that a lot of these people will use was third party. But they start creating consortiums. Consortiums where the third party verification is very transparent up and down the supply chain, and with all the players. And so, the transparency will take the audit, and allow different parties to address audited issues within their supply chain, and within upstream and downstream, and different players in the supply chain. >> The course that we're doing and you're helping us with is aimed at people that want to become sustainable business change agents. What can an individual do to impact sustainability in a company along the supply chain? What kind of a new person in a company, not a lot of experience maybe, what would you advise him to look for? >> I think, there are some things that they definitely need to do. I think, initially, they just have to increase their understanding. They have to have a domain knowledge and expert knowledge of supply chains. Know what supply chains are. Know what their supply chain is, understand their supply chain, understand sustainability and how they go together. And it's beyond, a lot of people that I talk with, and we start talking about the details of supply chain and sustainability, they say, I thought, I knew supply chains, but I knew what supply chains did. I didn't know, what supply chains were, and the first thing is understand the supply chain in detail, and understand sustainability. The next, is understand the organization. When you walk into an organization, understand their business case, their business plan, their mission, vision, values, what they're there for, what's important to them? Where are they going? And what's going to be valuable to them? And where can they go? What the possibilities are? And also understand the industry. Understand the industry that they're in, environmental factors that support sustainability in that industry, what they're doing, what they're not doing for the purpose of just being an educated and informed person before you start. And that's before you do anything. The second stage within now is action items. When you start actually working from that base of knowledge, I propose three levels. The first level is the first stage is, I call them action items and projects. And these are very important, a things like let us have a back to work it, work day. Let's have a recycle day. Let's have day where we go out, and do a run and support a local charity, and those are events. Those are local. And those are action items. And those are very important, because it raises awareness. It brings people together. And it brings people together for a sustainability purpose. And the purpose of that is to raise awareness. And I think, that's very important. But, again, that's a means to an end. That's not all of sustainability. That's the start. The next level is programs, and the purpose of raising awareness, and getting people involved, is creating programs within organizations. And these programs have to have support of the top management. And now you're engaging top management in a program of sustainability within an organization. And those programs then will be long term, or more medium term. And as you support a program, these programs, going back to the triple bottom line of sustainability, they have to have all three of those things. It can't be just focused on environmental, it can't be just focused on sociopolitical. It has to be sociopolitical, environmental and economic. It has to support the organization economically as well as environmentally and sociopolitically. And there's where you move toward trying to have a robust program, or a series of programs within an organization. And as that has developed and you develop a program, or a series of programs that are very effective. I think, you're moving towards a third stage. And the third stage is going to be different for every industry, different for every company, different for every supply chain. And, I think, that is, I guess, a guiding principle is to create a culture of sustainability. And creating a culture sustainability within these organizations. To describe that, you're not doing sustainability. Sustainability is naturally done by the culture, to where I know. And that's happens today. There are things that we do in our culture today that we naturally do. We don't even think about it anymore. 100 years ago, things that were done were the trash that we would use, the inefficiency we'd use. We wouldn't even think of doing that today. Well, 50 years, or 100 years from today sustainability needs to be part of. The operations and the supply chains. And so, that's where you're going. Just trying to create a culture that people will not do supply chains, but it's going to be part of their culture of doing it. And so, a person, or individual going in with this action items, looking at where you are on that spectrum. And that continue where you are, and why you are doing what you are doing to move to the next level. And into moving to a culture the individual needs to have a vision, a passion for the sustainability has to understand that. But if you're trying to create a culture, they need to keep in mind that they can't do this themselves. A culture is everybody, and they have to be a facilitator, they have to be satisfied with things being done, that they don't necessarily do it. And so, they have to engender everybody else to do it. And, I think, an individual has to keep all of that in mind when they start working. And if they do it's exciting and there is no end, they'll just keep going. >> That's great, in terms of the second level that you mentioned. Big companies like Walmart are seemingly anyway going to ask suppliers to supply a lot of sustainability information. Carbon footprints and whatnot. And presumably, at some point, they're going to say, we're going to buy from those that have good scores, and not from ones that have bad scores, or something like that. I mean, that seems to be the writing on the wall when you look at what companies are asking for in terms of information from suppliers, and that changes the game, I would think. >> Yes, because, or that your best true, and like Walmart, and General Electric, and a lot of larger companies are requiring certain standards from their suppliers. Because they can. Down the road it could be mandatory. And if you position yourself that when you have mandates, and you're already there, you have a competitive advantage over those suppliers that did not do that. And so, a lot of these suppliers are coming together in a consortium to make sure that they can help each other share resources, share knowledge, share expertise, so that they can be ready to comply with the regulations when they become mandatory. And, I think, down the road, we are going to have more mandatory requirements on sustainability. >> Yeah, I love what you said about permeating the culture. Someday, we won't talk about sustainable business, right, we'll just talk about business, and implied in there is sustainability, and ethics and everything that we're concerned with. >> Sustainability is not going away. Sustainability is here to stay. Right now, we do sustainability, in the future we won't. We'll do business and sustainability will be part of it. >> The final question on the list. What emerging corporate social responsibility trends to you see in supply chains? >> I believe, that a trend in the future with supply chains are not going to say, here is our standards, you do it. I think, that we're going to see a standardized approach to creating standards throughout the supply chain, because supply chains touches all continents, all communities, all cultures. I think we're going to start seeing a standardized structure on establishing how to practice sustainability across the globe. Because it is more on global community now. I think, another trend is going to be technology. In the past, we see it now that we have enormous amount information, enormous amount of data, and the another thing is just giving so much data. And the computer technology has advanced to where we have more data than we know what to do with. And, I think, one emerging trend is, how do we analyze this data? How do we actually go in and use the data effectively? How do we analyze the data? And, I think, one trend in the near future, starting now, is the analysis of the data and the analytics of having this data to impact supply change. And the impact on a supply change is going to be significant, because when you can see details, then you're strategies and your audits can be very revealing, because you are measuring. And accountability is going to be very different than reporting, you're actually going to be measuring exactly what people are doing. And it's no longer what they report what they're doing. You see what they're doing. >> Thanks so much, Mike.
