I'm here with Steve Bernard, he's an alum of the CU Denver sustainability program about 11 years ago. He has a career in supply chain management. And in the last ten years it's been increasingly influenced by the drive for sustainability. Steve, would you share a little bit about supply chain and what are the issues involved, what are some of the things you think about and how sustainability is really a dominant force in that? >> Sure. Be glad to, Ken. If you think about it as a journey If you're starting out in sustainability and working with supply chain think of a five year road map really to get you want to get and think about communicating out to your supplies with principles. Getting those posted out there. Because some of these things take time to get through your relationships with suppliers. So, as a company, you want to post these principles, some of our code of ethics, and get the word out to your suppliers. Then you want to start promoting those principles through Perhaps an assessment that you do with suppliers that can be either one that your company puts together on sustainability or one that is with organizations out there that do that for you. And in that you have your suppliers aligned with those principles principles, and then you want to connect internally with your corporate team, and understand the mission of your company. And if you're fortunate, you might have a sustainability staff within your corporate team. It's important that you get in early with that group as your setting up your supply chain program and align with the company and the mission of your sustainable program. And then, what you want to think about is what you're doing is helping other companies get started, in many cases with their corporate sustainability programs. So, you want to launch this off with this is what we do, therefore this is what we expect you to do so, you kind of align all the way from your corporate sustainability program to your suppliers. And then you want to look at how your contract relationships are with suppliers and in our business It takes maybe three, four, five year cycle to ingrain new language into contract. So you've got to, that's why the road map is important, get the sustainability requirement, the basic requirement ironed out. And then get it into your agreements and that's going to take some time. >> So what are the sustainability elements, what would you say >> You ask your suppliers to do? >> That is part of the journey and most recently we've been looking at elements of sustainability that really could break it down to maybe 10 elements. The traditional element is environmental programs, health and safety programs, which companies should be fairly mature on now. >> And then you want to start moving into areas like measuring winners gas emissions which is actually a very good way to collect data on the efficiency of your operation and companies are more and more collecting that information. You want to be looking at other elements with your suppliers, you want them to look at their suppliers measure that. You want to understand what all your stakeholders expect from your company and your supply chain. So, you're going to be asking suppliers about their stakeholder engagement. And as you move up this, it's kind of like a path from from beginning to ending up at a circular economy, I don't want to say beginning to end. >> Yeah. >> It's going to be ending up in this circular economy. You're going to be looking at improving your end to end logistics, you're going to be looking at the eco design of products and services. And you're going to pull all that together when you assess a supplier and you can get kind of a good roadmap. It's not necessarily the traditional compliance tool that you want to be engaging your supplier with. It's a best practice type engagement. It's a continuous improvement type engagement and as you go along this path you're going to build case studies. At this point it's really collecting case studies showing, how this sustainability effort benefitted the company, benefitted the community, and and entails the economic part of the two, the return on investment And those case studies over time start really showing and highlighting the true value of sustainability. And that gets us to when you're really in a mature state your supplier can actually talk to you about what's called total cost of ownership, which is a term in. In business that we've used for quite some time. So, it's kind of a journey. It's a journey I've been on and I'm still on. And probably, the last key point is working with companies around you, your industry group which gives you a focus on what that group does and their focus and then broader. You've heard of maybe CDP or Dow Jones Sustainability Index which gives you a broader understanding of how business operates and how our investors, what they expect of us, for social responsibility and sustainability. So it's a journey. We're still on it. And if you're just starting this journey, the good news is there's these starting points you can take with all these elements. Whether you're looking at your environmental program, or your social program, or your marketing program, you can start at any one of those points and then branch out. Thank you. Thank you, very much. >> Sure, yeah. >> Steve, can you tell us about the importance of establishing a baseline? >> Very important. When you're, especially with suppliers, you want to tune your assessment to establish that baseline. You want to get that assessment out. Standardize the The questions that you are asking the suppliers and then being able to benchmark it and be able to see across the supply base how each company is performing at the starting line and then you want to go through this for a few years and work with the suppliers on a The continuous improvement path from that base line. If you can't base line it, if you can't measure it, it is hard to really explain and discuss how you're making improvements in sustainability. Very important. >> What are the carrots and the sticks? You as, you're the big, you purchase a lot of things from the suppliers so they have a bit of dependence on you. I mentioned that's you know the stick is do you get the contract. But what are some the smaller things. You said you have to work with suppliers. How much leeway, how much progress do you expect. You're not OSHA. You are not the EPA so how does it different to have a business that sort of expects information from a supplier then if you were a government agency demanding? >> What you can do is incentivize suppliers with things like awards and positive reinforcement. Suppliers that support your efforts and sustainability that give a return on your investment, you can reward them and publicize those awards and then, suppliers get motivated to get that kind of award or that attention. >> So, you include that in your company's report? The companies, the suppliers, that are gold standard. >> When you're looking at requests for proposals you can incorporate those metrics into the evaluations. There's going to be a wide range of elements your going to look at when your evaluating a supplier of course. Sustainability and a growing sense is becoming one of those elements. It would be a weighted element, not a decision of you're going to go to this company versus this company based solely on that metric, it's going to be one of the important metric. >> Thank you. Thanks for sharing your expertise with us. >> Sure.
