Designing the Tools To Help Brands Become Carbon Neutral in Their Supply Chain
By David Boardman and Tracy Dai
At Flexport, our mission is to make global trade easy for our clients. We design tools to help them be resilient when facing the unexpected in their supply chains. We simplify and automate complex processes to reduce operational costs and help companies become more efficient.
There is one other thing that is equally important: the environment. It’s no secret that supply chains have a severe impact, as its emissions can add up to 90% of the overall CO2-equivalent (CO2e) volume of a company [source: EPA]. Brands are looking for ways to reduce their environmental impact and achieve a carbon-neutral supply chain, as they face growing pressure from investors, governmental bodies, environmentally-conscious customers and companies’ employees alike.
In this article, we go through the experience principles behind a set of tools that our UX team designed to provide clients with the means to measure, learn, reduce, and offset emissions in their supply chains.
Everything Starts With The Users
Through user research with client companies, we pieced together a profile for the stakeholders at companies who are in sustainability-related roles. Roughly speaking, sustainability managers are in charge of the following:
- Stay up-to-date on state-of-the-art sustainability programs.
- Advocate within their company for more investments in climate action.
- Plan, execute, and communicate results on companies’ emission strategies. This includes measuring and reporting the company’s carbon footprint to internal stakeholders, customer base, and governmental agencies.
- Evaluate mitigation strategies such as alternative energy (i.e., biofuels), supply chain optimization, and more.
- Offset emissions for circumstances in which these can’t be reduced.
With this in mind, how can we support sustainability managers’ needs at client companies?
№1 — Create Shared Awareness
Sustainability managers work within companies where several roles have access to our tools, often with different goals and tasks to perform. On our platform dashboard, we display to all users the amount of CO2e that is emitted into the environment at different grains (yearly basis, leg-by-leg, etc.). This creates a shared layer of basic information that could grow company-wide awareness. The widget on the platform dashboard shows fluctuations over time and provides a comparison with the average of other companies.
№2 — Provide Tools That Slice and Dice the Data
Sustainability managers can be asked to provide data at different grains, and for a range of “consumers” from governmental agencies and marketing departments to investors and customers. It is key to give sustainability managers the tools for reporting based on the intent and the audience being served. This includes the opportunity to download the datasets and enter them into other corporate tools.
With this need in mind, we designed a set of filters and visualizations that allow the users to dig deeper by analyzing their emissions by destination, supplier, products, and more. In addition to high-level metrics, users can also drill down to the details of their emission data to plan for specific climate actions within their companies, as well as monitor their historic trends.
This information can help sustainability managers inform reduction strategies such as striking the right balance between an environmentally conscious transportation mix (ocean, rail, air, and trucking), and the needs of the supply-demand cycles.
Further visualizations we designed include:
- Overview for emissions and offsets.
- Emissions by transportation mode.
- Emissions by SKU (“Stock keeping unit” — a code that retailers use to differentiate products and track inventory).
- Emissions by origin-destination ports (example: Hong Kong → Long Beach LA) and transportation leg (truck, ocean, rail, air).
- Emission by country.
№3 — Provide a Variety of Paths to Climate Action
The first step to reduction is to measure emissions. Once a baseline of measurements is in place, sustainability managers can identify the hotspots through different grains of data, and devise a specific strategy for their company.
When new clients come on board, we outline a path that is meant to meet brands where they are in their sustainability journey: Measure, Learn, Reduce, Offset. For some companies, the first step is to measure, whereas for others ahead in their sustainability journey, the next step is to evaluate reduction strategies (i.e, change transportation modes for key tradelanes, buy into offset programs, request consultations to manage a greener supply chain, and the like). Our Yearly Changes widget allows for different entry points to take action based on a company’s stage.
Closing the loop
As of August 2022, we have enabled access to the Emissions Analytics tool on the Flexport Platform for 26 beta customers. We are planning to expand the tools to a broader set of clients in the coming months.
As brands look further into how to measure and report their supply chain emissions data, our mission is to provide these companies the tools to evaluate reduction strategies and increase transparency towards investors, governmental agencies, customers and employees.
Thanks to
Flexport.org team, Philip Rhodes (UX Research Director), David Weinberger (Design Operations Manager), Brian Astrup and Jesse Kelber (Content).
