Sustainability and B2B Outsourcing

Doing Well by Your Stakeholders While Doing Well by the Environment and Future Generations

It's not often when the choice is this simple. Pursuing a reduced supply chain carbon footprint through outsourcing B2B actually helps improve your bottom line. Three primary drivers─error reduction, transportation improvements and IT optimization come together in a mature B2B program to both reduce costs and provide significant environmental benefits.

Automating Sustainability's Business Benefits

If you are like most businesses, the majority of the orders you send and receive are exchanged manually. For instance, AMR Research estimates only 20% of all orders in the retail supply chain are fully automated. Another 20% are sent electronically, but need manual intervention on the supplier side. Similarly, almost every other industry has limited automation when it comes to their supply chains. And this applies to both direct and indirect purchases. Both goods used to produce products and those used to sustain operations (pens, paper, staples, etc.) are ordered manually. Often, those orders are changed after the initial order is placed and almost always those change orders are handled manually, reducing the effectiveness of automation endeavors. The more documents you automate, and the more trading partners you automate with, the greater the maturity of your B2B program. But orders are just the tip of the iceberg. Ship notices, invoices and other business documents are too often manually managed transactions.

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