Supply Chain Sustainability
Engaging with our partners to foster responsible business practices across our entire value chain
As a luxury retailer, our supply chain sustainability is one of our material topics. In 2020, we leveraged digitalisation and enhanced engagement with our partners to ensure responsible business practices are fostered across our entire value chain.
Responsible Consumption and Production
Since its inception in 2018, our strategy for responsible consumption and production has come a long way. In 2019 we achieved the milestone of implementing a fully developed strategy with the objective of managing our energy, waste, logistics and procurement processes efficiently, with minimal environmental and social impact under five focus areas (know more).
In 2020 our roadmap, produced in 2019, that considered adopting more responsible procurement processes and milestones, which included coming up with a revamped recycling system design that is more effective, upgrading and digitising our in-store environmental performance assessment tool (STEP), and heavily reducing our consumption of single-use plastics and paper (know more) has guided our activities that have actioned the strategy. Additionally, digitalisation of our Supplier Scorecard is beginning to enhance our collaborative sustainability efforts with our suppliers.
To improve the effectiveness of our Supplier Scorecard, which assesses our suppliers’ sustainability performance, we set a target in 2019 for 400 of our suppliers to be assessed in 2020 (know more) .
To achieve our goal, this year we integrated our Supplier Scorecard system into our supplier creation process with the objective of automating the system. Following from last year’s trial using the SAP Qualtrics tool (know more), we migrated from our existing manual Excel-based scorecard to a system hosted on our intranet. This enabled us to consolidate all our supplier feedback and generate data that we will be able to use for honest and open engagement with our partners. In 2020 we prioritised development of a robust system that ensures as many suppliers as possible have completed our scorecard accurately and honestly.
Results showed that we managed to have 577 suppliers fill our scorecard, which is 44% more than our target for 2020.Examples of how this was actioned included, sending of reminders every two weeks, talking to them directly and delivering bespoke communications which we believed to be in the appropriate tone and language for the individual supplier. We learned from this that to receive our desired 100% response rate, we will need to dedicate more time to engaging with them. Our current response rate is 26%, hence, we have set a target of increasing our response rate by 2.5% per quarter.
At this response rate, we anticipate that in 2023 we will achieve a completion rate of up to 60% from our existing supplier and double our current rate from our existing and new suppliers combined annually. Furthermore, in 2021 we plan to open conversations with our suppliers with the lowest scorecard scores to gain insight on how best to support and learn from each other to meet the responsible business practices defined under the UNGC Principles.
