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Decarbonise Your Value Chain: A Sustainable Approach to Supply Chain Management

April 2023

As businesses continue to prioritise sustainability and decarbonisation, the role of planning software in achieving these goals has become increasingly important. It can help businesses reduce their carbon footprint and adopt sustainable practices throughout the supply chain.

Within sofco Planning various environmental constraints can be defined in order to limit overall production in line with the maximum level of CO2, water usage etc.

Read on as we delve deeper into some of the specific planning software solutions that comprise sofco Planning and detail how they help reduce carbon emissions in the supply chain.

Demand Planning

Demand Planning helps businesses accurately forecast customer demand, enabling them to optimise production and reduce waste. By reducing the amount of excess inventory, you can also reduce the carbon emissions associated with manufacturing and transportation as CO2 , for example, is categorised as a by-product so a future inventory projection would give the amount of CO2 being produced. This information would support future decision making, along with accurate demand planning designed to help businesses avoid overproduction and unnecessary transportation, reduce their carbon emissions, and improve sustainability.

Supply Planning

By improving supplier performance and reducing lead times, businesses can reduce the amount of inventory and transportation needed, again implementing the categorisation of CO2 as a by-product, for example. This can lead to significant reductions in carbon emissions, as fewer shipments and less inventory translate to a much reduced carbon footprint.

Scheduling

By implementing Scheduling software, businesses will improve their production schedules to reduce downtime and improve efficiency. By maximizing production throughput, businesses can reduce the amount of time spent in production and, in turn, reduce the amount of energy and resources needed, perhaps adopting a sustainably focused set of constraints such as CO2 , water or energy usage generally. By minimizing the amount of energy needed for production, businesses can reduce their carbon emissions and improve sustainability.

Sales and Operations Planning

Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) helps businesses align their sales and production plans, ensuring that production is matched to demand and the overall business objectives. This can help businesses avoid overproduction and waste, reducing carbon emissions and improving sustainability. By enabling better communication between sales and production teams, S&OP can also help businesses optimize their inventory levels and reduce transportation needs, further reducing carbon emissions. Specifically, with sofco Planning, we can build in assumptions on future costs of raw material, energy and waste and roll these values into the finished product for use in decision making regarding future sourcing and finished goods pricing.

Trade Promotions Management

By utilising Trade Promotions Management software, businesses can reduce their waste output by cutting back on overproduction and unnecessary distribution. With accurate forecasting and planning, promotions can be tailored to actual demand, reducing the amount of excess inventory that needs to be produce, distributed, and ultimately wasted. Additionally, businesses can optimise their supply chain and transportation needs, reducing carbon emissions and promoting sustainability, efficiency, and profitability.

Collaborative Forecaster

Improving collaboration can have a positive impact on the environment by reducing waste and the associated carbon emissions. With better collaboration, teams can work together to optimise production schedules, reduce excess inventory, and minimize transportation needs. This can result in more efficient use of resources and reduced carbon footprint throughout the supply chain. By using planning software to improve collaboration, businesses can take a proactive approach to sustainability and contribute to the global effort to combat climate change.

Summary

It’s widely accepted that planning software plays a vital role in reducing carbon emissions and improving sustainability in the supply chain. By implementing any element of sofco Planning with its tailored algorithms designed to give you full visibility regarding future costs of resources and inventory planning in a sustainable way, businesses can reduce their carbon footprint, improve sustainability, and help combat the effects of climate change. In 2023, with the increasing importance of sustainability in the business world, it is more important than ever for businesses to act and adopt a solution to decarbonise their value chain.

Trusted by our clients

“Greencore is involved in multiple categories, supplying a diverse range of products with different characteristics that require very different manufacturing processes. We selected sofco as they have an End-to-End planning and execution system that can be configured easily to fit these disparate demands. Our approach is much more sophisticated and collaborative now.”

Chris Chestney

IT Business Partner, Greencore

“What impressed us most about the sofco people was they understood our business, listened, and would bring a lot of experience to the project. They brought solid solutions to the issues we presented them with. It was clear from the outset that we were going to be able to work well together as a team and deliver this project. That is exactly what has happened.”

Barbara Van den Berg

Project Manager, Van Geloven

British Bakels

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