van Rees: Turning Supply Chain Data into Sustainability Strategy
Van Rees is a global tea company, sourcing and supplying tea and other botanical ingredients worldwide. Operating in a highly competitive market, the company faces growing expectations from both legislation and customers to ensure socially and environmentally sustainable value chains. Within Van Rees, Miranda Pieron serves as Sustainability Specialist, overseeing the ESG strategy, procedures, and reporting.
Challenge
Understanding nature impact deep in the supply chain
As for many companies, the big majority of van Rees’s environmental impact resides deep within their global value chain. Exactly where their influence is limited. To drive change, they would need to:
- Understand supply chains’ impacts and dependencies on nature through a science-based approach.
- Explore solutions for improving their due diligence activities – and take appropriate action – based on trusted, context-specific information, beyond what generic search tools can offer.
- Engage suppliers and other stakeholders with a compelling business case and a clear path forward.
Solution
Risk prioritization and supplier-ready business cases
Spirefly offers all the ingredients to tackle these well known challenges. First, it calculated nature- and climate-related impacts and risks for their supply chains, providing an environment to ‘talk to the data’ to analyze it. This enabled a quantitative risk prioritization of suppliers without requiring deep technical know-how. Following this analysis, the agent served as a trusted environment to spar on solutions, using curated sources and context about the industry. Finally, specialized workflows helped to easily pour all this new information into actionable formats ready for the next steps.
Result
Quantitative supplier prioritization and management buy-in
The process delivered concrete, high-value insight, information and suggestions that could be immediately implemented. Unlike generic AI, the contents came from trusted, context-aware sources, which was crucial for building confidence in the outcomes.
The key outcomes included:
- Quantitative prioritization of country- and supplier footprints, providing a clear focus for engagement efforts.
- Drafted surveys as part of an improved due diligence process for better data and monitoring regarding sustainability risks.
- Compelling one-pagers with well-researched arguments to convince management and build internal support.
“I could use the results directly in my work. Unlike with general AI chatbots, I really felt that I could trust the data and information that was provided, and that it provided spot-on suggestions.”
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Norsys: Giving Nature a Science-Based Voice in IT Services
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From pilot to policy: HEMA's nature journey with Spirefly
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