Minimize value chain impacts

- Simply put, the concept of a value chain versus a supply chain implies that everyone along the chain deserves to extract real demonstrative value. This was a somewhat radical concept when first introduced 15 to 20 years ago. Up to that point, a company's supply chain pretty much extended to the first tier relationship it had with its key vendors. Therefore, almost everything in your vendor's own supply chain was invisible to your company. The scary thing was, much of what was going on in your vendor supply chain was invisible to them. And so on, and so on, down the supply chain. It became a zero sum game for almost everybody, including workers and the environment. These days, many of the world's best companies aspire to not just manage risk, but to create real value across their global supply networks, and in their key communities. The concept has various names, including creating shared value, but the idea is a basic and proven one. Healthy value chains provide more stability and higher quality because the whole system, human, environmental, and economic is better managed. Healthy value chains are proven to better manage risk and provide more predictability around quality, reliability, delivery, and cost of products and services. If you were to build at truly high-performing value chain, what would it look like? It would be nonpolluting, conserving of energy and natural resources, economically viable across the chain, and resilient to stress, safer and more healthful for workers, communities, and consumers. You can improve the health and viability of your value chain by ensuring your products and packaging are designed to be safe and ecologically sound throughout their life cycle. Designing and producing products and services to satisfy real human needs, and promote equity and fairness. Making sure waste and byproducts are reduced, eliminated, or recycled. Specifying that chemicals that negatively impact human health or the environment are eliminated. Enabling energy, water, and other natural resources and materials to be conserved. Verifying that factories and workplaces are designed to minimize or eliminate chemical, environmental and physical hazards. Proving through measurement that communities around key factories, farms, and other workplaces are respected and enhanced, economically, socially, and environmentally through association with you. As the world grows smaller and companies of almost every size pursue business opportunities outside their home countries, operating sustainable value chains is a business necessity. It helps keep your company safe against disruptions in the global marketplace, provides transparency that helps you manage the business, and positions the company as one that is preferred by its stakeholders, especially in times of uncertainty or crisis.