Become a sustainability champion

- Baseball legend Mickey Mantle once said, "If I knew I was going to live this long, "I'd have taken better care of myself." And that's pretty good way to think about the importance of environmental sustainability because the whole point of sustainability is to ensure that we can continue living on Earth for a long, long time. In this video, we'll look at how you can make your supply chain more sustainable using some basic operations management techniques. To start with, let's look at the resources that we use. Manufacturers consume raw materials and convert them into finished products, so every manufacturing supply chain stretches back to mines, and forests, and farms, and oceans. And every company consumes energy to run machines, generate heat, keep offices cool, and power computers. Both the energy and the raw materials that we use can come from two different kinds of sources. Renewable sources or nonrenewable sources. Renewable energy comes from sources like solar power, hydroelectric, geothermal, biomass, or wind power. Nonrenewable energy comes from materials that are extracted from the earth, coal, petroleum, and natural gas. These fuels are nonrenewable because once they've been used up, they're gone forever. Renewable materials come from animals, plants, trees, and microorganisms. You can renew these materials relatively quickly by growing more. Most nonrenewable materials are mined from the ground, but some are extracted from the water or the air. There are two main ways that companies measure their environmental sustainability. The first approach is to measure their consumption, how much energy and materials they consume. For example, many facilities track their monthly usage of water and electricity. The second way that companies measure sustainability is by how much waste they produce. For instance, you've probably seen reports about the amount of carbon dioxide that companies emit into the atmosphere. Those metrics for consumption and emission are things that every supply chain operations manager should be watching because they're really just the inputs and the outputs for a process. So here's a three step approach that you can use to find ways to improve the environmental sustainability of your own supply chain. First, reduce waste. Use tools like Lean, Six Sigma, and Theory of Constraints to ensure that your operations are running as efficiently as possible. If you can't eliminate waste completely, then try to recycle the waste that's left over from your processes. Second, reduce consumption. Look for ways to provide your customers with the products and services they need, while using less materials. Designing products so that you can repair, reuse, and remanufacture them can significantly reduce the amount of raw materials needed to support your supply chain. And third, switch to renewable sources of energy and materials. Consuming renewable resources ensures that your business can continue for a long time. We've all got to share this one planet. The decisions that you make about operations, logistics, and supply chain management, can have a big impact on the condition of that planet, and the quality of life for all of us. And the great news is that becoming a sustainability champion can actually help you drive efficiency improvements throughout your entire supply chain.