Retail organizations face mounting pressure to address their environmental impact—particularly when it comes to supply chain emissions, which are 11.4 times higher than operational emissions on average. While corporations are increasingly committed to supply chain sustainability, with nearly 70% actively working to help suppliers decarbonize, the path to meaningful progress is hindered by fragmented data and organizational silos.
That’s why we’re excited to announce our partnership with SPS Commerce, a leader in retail supply chain cloud services. Together, we’re launching the Retail Sustainability Collective, a joint solution that will transform how retailers and their suppliers collaborate on sustainability initiatives.
Bridging the gap between commitment and action
Measuring and reducing supply chain emissions across the retail industry is stymied by a lack of primary data. When category averages are the main source of emissions data, there’s no insight into which suppliers are performing well and where to prioritize engagement to reduce emissions. Without primary data, retailers cannot build plans for decarbonization, let alone achieve real outcomes.
But gathering primary supplier data is no easy feat. For retailers, reaching out to suppliers is a sizable challenge. Organizational silos divide supply chain, merchandising, procurement, and sustainability functions, making it hard for sustainability leaders to identify the right supplier contacts and build credibility with them. Meanwhile, suppliers face a slew of disparate ESG surveys from each of their retail customers, and often lack the resources to calculate their emissions, let alone respond to dozens of cumbersome questionnaires.
“These challenges aren’t unique to emissions data” shares Scott Williams, Senior Manager, Product Management at SPS Commerce. “We’ve been helping retailers and suppliers face these same kinds of visibility and data collection challenges for decades across all sorts of supply chain datasets.”
Introducing the Retail Sustainability Collective
By combining Optera’s expertise in supply chain emissions management with SPS Commerce’s two decades of experience in retailer-supplier data exchange, the Retail Sustainability Collective offers a unified approach that benefits both retailers and suppliers:
For suppliers:
- A streamlined, single submission process for sharing emissions data with multiple retail customers
- Built-in calculation tools and resources that accommodate all levels of sustainability maturity
- Valuable benchmarking insights to understand performance relative to peers
For retailers:
- Comprehensive primary data coverage across their entire supply chain
- Expert support and a proven methodology for supplier outreach, education, and response validation
- Enhanced collaboration between sustainability and supply chain teams, using infrastructure and vendor relationships already in place
- More accurate and complete reporting and greater ability to achieve emissions reduction targets
Building on a proven methodology and network
Through the Collective, retailers and suppliers will benefit from decades of expertise and trusted products brought together by Optera and SPS Commerce.
For nearly twenty years, Optera has partnered with leading global retailers and manufacturers to advance emissions calculation and management. Optera’s supplier data collection module, Outreach, helps suppliers navigate one of three pathways – estimation, calculation, or reporting – based on their data maturity. Over 2,000 suppliers in 25 countries have used Outreach to share primary emissions with key corporate customers.
SPS Commerce has spent over two decades successfully solving similar data challenges between retailers and suppliers, facilitating suppliers to share item, sales, and EDI data with their retail partners. Through this partnership, they’ll apply this proven framework for supplier engagement and streamline the process through systems and infrastructure that suppliers and retailers already use every day.
“For too long, sustainability teams have been going it alone, often in a siloed function trying to build separate, and sometimes duplicate, processes and programs from scratch,” shares Tim Weiss, CEO and co-founder of Optera. “The Retail Sustainability Collective will enable sustainability teams to tap into existing networks and processes within their organizations – streamlining emissions management and making it a core part of business operations. Supply Chain decarbonization requires coordination across an entire organization, and we are excited to catalyze that through the Collective.”
Join the Collective
The Retail Sustainability Collective is launching as a pilot program with select major retailers in early 2025, followed by a broader rollout across the full network later in the year.
For more information about the Retail Sustainability Collective, contact your Optera or SPS Commerce representative or get in touch.
