The Practicalities of Supply Chain Traceability and Transparency

Over the last year IBM has been working with UKFT, Leeds University, Techdata and a variety of BRC members to tackle traceability and transparency across the supply chain for cotton and wool – and more recently has been further extended into other areas such as Pet Food. The result of this effort has been an award-winning fashion trust platform.

But rather than talk about what the platform does I wanted to share the lessons that we learnt through building it – from technical to the human aspects – and how we could learn from these to drive the future delivery of sustainable supply chains.

Supply chains in their current format have developed over the decades to drive optimal performance at every stage of the manufacturing process. This has created pockets of excellence that are jealously protected from an IP perspective and create a process that is the very opposite of the transparent networks that we need today to deliver a sustainable future.

Now we could throw up our arms at this point and say we need to fundamentally redesign everything that we do. There is, however, an awful lot of good in the processes that we’ve created. As well as being highly efficient and effective processes, the development of global supply chains, when working effectively, has also offered the opportunity for poverty alleviation/wealth development in markets across the world. Looking at simply collapsing supply chains, going local, etc. risks throwing out a lot of the good while striving for that sustainable approach.

What we've been advocating as part of the fashion trust platform is to drive a fibre forward approach that is platform driven (i.e. we share data across organisations rather than working for a single organisation) and uses exponential technologies to scale that solution across the industry. The reasons for this boiled down to a few key points.

Product backward solutions, while effective, only work for the product being traced and require dedicated interventions by all elements of the supply chain to produce the end result. This puts significant pressure on the supply chain in that each supplier is then required to go into their archives search out the invoices/batches that are involved in the product and then provide that data - which is incredibly labour intensive. It is also not particularly repeatable and expensive. 

Focusing on a single product has other disadvantages as well in that it pushes organisations to over focus on that product, potentially at the expense of driving a more ubiquitous sustainability solution across the entire supply chain. 

In the solution that we have been developing the approach has been to change the way that supply chains operate to easily provide the sustainability data (in its broadest possible sense) as part of the production process. We are also collecting the data once, then can use it everywhere. So once a supplier is on the network then any end user organisation that uses that supplier can potentially have access to their data. This makes it easier for suppliers and more cost effective for all supply chain participants. 

This does come with some additional complications in areas such as the collection of the data. As you move down the supply chain, the sophistication from a technical perspective potentially decreases. Our experience was that for cotton, beyond tier 3 the process becomes heavily paper based – and in some circumstances had no written elements at all. In order to overcome this we needed to use document ingestion coupled with natural language processing, and text and voice ingestion in order to create a full set of records. 

Once the technical hurdles have been overcome, we then start to move into some of the behavioural changes that are required. As mentioned earlier in the article the supply chain has been set up to compartmentalise data (to protect competitive advantage) and in pulling together these solutions we're affectively asking supply chain participants to share what potentially could be sensitive data. In the early phases of the work a considerable amount of time and effort was put into talking to suppliers to explain what we were doing and why we were doing it. Interestingly as the work progressed and what we were doing became public knowledge, we actually ended up with the opposite effect where organisations were reaching out to join the platform in order that they could then use it to demonstrate their sustainability credentials. 

The other key learning from the process was the need for broader industry collaboration. The members of the consortium working on the fashion trust platform brought a wide range of skills but there is already significant expertise in the industry, across NGOs and in other organisations that are trying to drive the change. Any solution needs to be able to combine both the raw supply chain data and the ability to integrate with data from organisations like BRC, Textile Genesis, etc. and industry audit bodies to provide the breadth of data needed on some of the more complex elements of sustainability tracking. 

To date there is still a lot of parallel work going on (and we are guilty of this as well at the moment!) with a variety of platforms being built and tested. We simply don't have the time to compete our way to the future - greater cooperation is required. 

Finally, and as I am from a technology organisation I'm sure you'll not be surprised to hear that is where I'm going to end, there is the technical element of making this work. In building out the solution that we have we are in essence creating the sustainability data lake. We then use AI/analytics on targeted use cases to create insights and drive value. This is essential so as to create value at every stage of the development journey – building confidence in the solution/approach – hence the reason that we believe an iterative journey needs to be taken where value can be achieved early and often. 

The process of developing the fashion trust solution has been incredibly helpful in not only shaping the solution but also informing all the participants around both the challenges that are going to be faced and potential solutions to address them. I look forward to working with the broader BRC community in pulling together to develop those solutions and to do so rapidly in order that we can fundamentally shift the positioning of the UK retail industry to deliver the just transition needed.

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