Episode 556: Blue Yonder CSO Saskia van Gendt on Sustainability as a Supply Chain Superpower

Lance (0:12)

Welcome into a new episode. Today's guest is Saskia van Gendt. She is the Chief Sustainability Officer at Blue Yonder. Saskia, thanks so much for joining us. Happy to have you here.

Saskia van Gendt (0:22)

Great to be here. Looking forward to the conversation.

Lance (0:24)

So before we get into sustainability, I want to provide listeners with a foundation for Blue Yonder, the company has obviously seen great success and operates in a very consequential and an important industry. Paint a picture for what Blue Yonder does and why the supply chain is such an important place to be working right now.

Yeah.

Saskia van Gendt (0:47)

So Blue Yonder is an AI company for supply chain. We have an AI driven platform and a multi-tier network that is empowering our customers to operate more sustainably, scale profitably, and it's all operating at machine speed. So it's applying all of this innovation around technology and solutions to help our customers from everything from sourcing, manufacturing, logistics, which includes transportation, warehousing, and even returns.

And sustainability is now woven into all of those different aspects of the supply chain. And the reason that's important is that majority of a company's footprint really exists within the supply chain. So for most companies, a typical company, supply chain accounts for more than 80% of their greenhouse gas emissions, more than 90% of their impact on air, land, water, biodiversity. So if you're ignoring your supply chain, you're really not addressing your total impact. And we see that companies are increasingly looking to their supply chains to improve their environmental performance and also build resiliency around how do they mitigate things like climate impacts and looking at alternative sourcing to reduce risk overall within their business. And that's a key lever really of supply chains. And the reason that this all comes back to technology and solutions is that the ways that companies are forecasting demand, managing inventory, sourcing materials, transporting goods, all of this affects the total environmental footprint of that company. And if sustainability is not imbedded into those day-to-day decisions, it's truly difficult to actually make measurable products, progress, excuse me.

And then we see that sustainability really can't sit at the corporate strategy. It has to show up within everyday operations.

Lance (2:44)

And we're going to talk about how it does appley on. But I like a couple of words you used in that answer. You said woven, you said imbedded, right? Because a lot of companies and a lot of industries, they have sustainability as part of their business, but it isn't really like woven into and deeply integrated within. It's sort of like a side thing, so to speak. How does Blue Yonder go about weaving sustainability into what it does and really making sure that, like you just said, it has a seat at the table, an important seat at the table in not only the progress the company is making, but various products, excuse me, that the company has as well.

Saskia van Gendt (3:18)

Yeah, and I think we have made a lot of progress around making sustainability more integrated, more woven throughout different companies. I've been working in sustainability for about 20 years, so I have seen a very steady progress over having sustainability operate as a standalone part of the business. Maybe there's a small team that is in charge of developing the strategy and then working with every business. We really see that over the past two decades, a lot of progress has been made to percolate that high-level strategy into different decision-making parts of the business and also different teams. But of course, there are still a lot of challenges in doing that.

Technology can be an incredible stabilizer and information, cutting across information and data across the business, which is incredibly powerful at facilitating that operationalization. So if you think about things like having shared data across all of the different touch points in the supply chain, and also seeing how decisions in one part of the supply chain might affect performance elsewhere in the supply chain, that's really where you can see the duality of sustainability benefits and also general supply chain benefits come through. So not only is sustainability becoming more woven throughout different organizations, but it's becoming less siloed in how companies are operating their supply chain. So you really need that end-to-end visibility.

What Blue Yonder has been doing from a technology perspective is bringing all of the important metrics from a sustainability metrics. So things like carbon emissions, total waste, ESG risk, bringing those into the same platforms where companies are making data decisions. What that helps with is the visibility of how the decisions are affecting things like cost, service levels, but also the sustainability performance, and also the ability to integrate things like carbon emissions when you're developing your future plans. So you're not just developing plans based on traditional supply chain metrics. You can actually include things like reducing waste and reducing carbon emissions as sustainability objectives in those future plans. So we're seeing a lot more traction, especially from leadership around the need for that operationalizing and also the need for solutions to facilitate that. We do an annual supply chain compass, and there's a spotlight on sustainability. We found that 66 percent of leaders are actively working to reduce their supply chains impact and they see technology as being a real change maker in doing that.