Retail Sustainability Collective Transforms Supply Chains

Retail supply chains are estimated to be the source of nearly 11.4 times more carbon emissions compared with direct operations. Against this backdrop, a more holistic decarbonization approach has become increasingly necessary. Close to 70% of companies are indeed promoting efforts by their suppliers to reduce emissions, but the challenge is to better integrate disparate data and group silos of work coming from internal processes across the organization. In response to this challenge, Optera and SPS Commerce have partnered to create the Retail Sustainability Collective, a first-of-its-kind initiative to change the way retailers and suppliers work together on sustainability.

This will ensure easier processes of data collection and submission from suppliers and also give the retailers quality data, all within one unifying approach, thus not only increasing data accuracy but also forming closer collaborations between sustainability teams and supply chain operations for better effective and actionable sustainability plans.

Scott Williams, Senior Manager of Product Management at SPS Commerce, emphasized the significance of this collaboration. “These challenges aren’t unique to emissions data. We’ve been helping retailers and suppliers face similar visibility and data collection challenges across various supply chain datasets for decades,” he said. By applying their expertise in supply chain data management, SPS Commerce is working to integrate sustainability metrics into existing frameworks, making it easier for organizations to act on their commitments.

The Retail Sustainability Collective leverages Optera’s expertise in emissions management and SPS Commerce’s extensive experience in data exchange. For suppliers, the initiative offers a single submission process for multiple retail customers, emissions calculation tools tailored to varying levels of sustainability maturity, and benchmarking insights for performance evaluation. For retailers, it opens up access to comprehensive primary emissions data across the entire supply chain and provides expert support for supplier outreach and data validation. The partnership also streamlines collaboration using existing supply chain infrastructures, making sustainability a seamless part of core business operations.

Optera's outreach module collects the data of suppliers that have been pivotal in the initiative as it offers three channels through which suppliers can share primary emissions data: estimation, calculation, or reporting. These channels are matched and adapted to fit the data maturity of each supplier. To date, more than 2,000 suppliers in over 25 countries have used Outreach to provide emissions data and represent its impact and scalability.

SPS Commerce brings decades of experience in simplifying supplier data sharing for item, sales, and EDI information. The company extends these established frameworks to include emissions data, so suppliers can use familiar tools for a new purpose: reducing their environmental footprint.

Tim Weiss, Optera CEO and co-founder, emphasized broader implications of the partnership. "For too long, sustainability teams have been in silos, building processes from scratch. The Retail Sustainability Collective allows these teams to tap into existing organizational networks, integrating emissions management as a core business function," he pointed out. In essence, the integration is pivotal in meaningful decarbonization.

The Retail Sustainability Collective is less about process simplification and much more about how retailing approaches supply chain sustainability. It does that by bringing emissions management together with infrastructures built long ago by mature supply chain, helping companies evolve from ad-hoc work into coordinated actions of impact.

With both Optera and SPS Commerce bringing proven expertise to the table, the Retail Sustainability Collective is well-positioned to drive significant progress in reducing supply chain emissions. As businesses become increasingly focused on sustainability, this partnership offers a scalable, collaborative model for achieving decarbonization goals. It, by addressing data fragmentation and increasing the strength of collaboration between the retailers and their suppliers, provides a new standard for sustainability in supply chain activities and hence is a new dawn for the retail sector.