Sustainability 101: Where do I begin? Start at the source

Sustainability is now a relevant concern and an opportunity to answer consumer worries and demands about our planet's future. As a result, this behavior drives greater emphasis on environmentally friendly assortments, responsible sourcing, and recycling. The opportunity for eco-assortments is growing with the potential for optimized journeys, increasing margin, premiums for eco-brands, increasing revenue, and transparency, increasing choice and trust.

Let's be honest. Sustainability is a little daunting because there are many ways to get started. The risk feels high with limited data. How complicated does it have to be? How sophisticated does your supply chain need to be?

Our experts, Carla Anderson, Senior Cloud Architect, and Paul Woodward, Senior Director, Sustainability, break it down in a Zoom Zone session now available on demand.

Operationalizing sustainability, finding the opportunities and mitigating the risk

Consumers are increasingly pressuring retailers to exercise their social responsibility by offering sustainable products and services. Mitigating risk and, more importantly, identifying opportunities to improve operations and meet consumer demand is critical to the industry.

With technology, retailers can execute, operationalize, and accelerate meaningful changes by enabling every associate, every supplier, and every consumer to take simple steps to make a big difference in the operation.

To reduce supply chain risks, it is essential to:

• collaborate on compliance and improvement programs,

• manage certified evidence, validation, and conformance suppliers' facilities,

• create or utilize pre-defined assessments,

• define, schedule, and conduct on-site facility audits and visits,

• publish and communicate policies, standards, training material, processes, guidelines, and regulations,

• design and create critical stage-gate processes,

• access performance dashboards,

• provide access to corporate and facility details and contacts.

Oracle is taking four steps to operationalize sustainability across the platform for modern retail to enable retailers to simplify and deliver on their goals:

1. infuse sustainability into all cloud services across our platform,
2. augment the platform with new services, features, and insights to capture, manage and deliver tangible improvements,
3. recycle the data and use AI to optimize and generate actionable insights that align with retailers’ corporate guidelines or initiatives around more sustainable activities,
4. simplifying and operationalizing sustainable retail.

Watch the full recording to learn how operationalizing sustainable sourcing in the merchandise procurement process will help buyers gain insight and make more intelligent choices.

The world is watching. Let's get started.