SupplyShift to host Summit on Responsible Supply Chains

• Two-day symposium, hosted by SupplyShift
• November 4-5, 2019
• The Dream Inn, Santa Cruz, CA
• Register

Join a select group of responsible sourcing practitioners and industry experts to explore the challenges and solutions in supply chain sustainability today. Discover new, practical approaches to help your business chart a path toward achieving its sustainability goals.

Program November 4 – Day 1

Plenary Session: The Journey of Responsible Sourcing

Responsible sourcing and supply chain sustainability have exploded in recent years, and the global business landscape is more focused on delivering its sustainability goals than ever before. But with 2020 approaching fast and plenty of work left to do, it’s now critical that businesses put their plans into practice.

Join Alex Gershenson, CEO of SupplyShift, and Euan Murray, CEO of The Sustainability Consortium as they frame the discussion at the Summit on Responsible Supply Chains.  Learn where responsible sourcing came from, what businesses have been doing to drive progress, and where the function is headed in the future.

Speakers:
Alex Gershenson, CEO & Co-founder, SupplyShift
Euan Murray, CEO, The Sustainability Consortium

Panel: Responsible Sourcing Maturity Models

Getting started on your responsible sourcing program can be a massive challenge for businesses. How do you know where to start? What makes the most sense for your team and the limited resources you have?  What does it mean to have a “mature” responsible sourcing program? Hear how leading companies and data providers have developed their supplier sustainability models. Learn how they got started, assigned priority, targeted hot spots, and ultimately built programs that help them address the unique issues in their supply chains.

Speakers:
Nathalie Craik, Ethical Compliance Manager, LUSH
Sam Haynes, Head of Risk Analytics, Verisk Maplecroft

Panel: Beyond Compliance – Building an Effective Social Responsibility Program

Supplier contracts, codes of conduct, and certifications may help limit your company’s liability, but they do little to ensure your supply chain is free from modern slavery and other human rights violations. At the same time, no company has the resources to support ongoing audits at every supplier facility. What’s the right balance? How can you maximize the impact of your social responsibility efforts without drowning in data? Hear from a panel of experts as they talk through the approaches they use to target the entire lifecycle of supply chain labor assessment, from high-level risk filtering to smart facility audits and worker voice programs.

Speakers:
David Camp, Managing Director, Fast Forward
Arisa Goldstone, Director of Business Development, Ulula

Panel: How to Sell Supply Chain Sustainability Internally

Sustainability is becoming more widely accepted as a core principle of global business, but supply chain and sustainability professionals often struggle to get buy-in from the rest of their company. How can you communicate the value of supply chain sustainability to bring leadership and other internal stakeholders on board? How can you demonstrate alignment between your goals and the broader goals of the business? Join us to hear how General Mills and Flex have tackled this issue at their companies.

Speakers:
Bruce Klafter, VP of Corporate Social and Environmental Responsibility, Flex
Sara Allen, Sustainability Analyst, General Mills

Panel: Driving Impact in Smallholder Communities

It’s not uncommon for sustainability programs to prioritize on environmental issues, but social factors within the supply chain are critical to any comprehensive program.  How can companies ensure the communities they do business with are given the tools they need to advocate for themselves and their business, produce more sustainably, and create a more ethical work environment? Hear how Sustainable Growers uses data to help their smallholder communities thrive through targeted training and financing.

Speakers:
Ruth Coleman, Executive Director, Sustainable Growers
Richard Nuwagaba, M&E Technology Manager, Sustainable Growers

Panel: Cross-Functional Responsible Sourcing
 
Global companies are working diligently to meet their corporate social responsibility commitments, and sustainability teams have been hard at work collecting data to back them up. But despite the progress toward initiatives, other business functions continue to make decisions without access to sustainability data, which diminishes the broader impact sustainability efforts can have. Hear from leaders in Procurement, Marketing, and Sustainability on how their roles interact with responsible sourcing, and how supply chain data can be leveraged throughout a business to increase effectiveness, prove purpose, and drive profit.

Speakers:
Sustainability – Getting the Right Data: Speaker TBA
Procurement – Using Sustainability in Procurement Decisions: Steven Wuerth, Associate Procurement Director, Gilead Sciences
Marketing – Differentiation & Brand Protection: Annie Longsworth, Executive Managing Director, Social Impact and Sustainability, RF | Binder

Program November 5 – Day 2

Plenary Session: The Role of Industry Groups in Sustainability

As the sustainability world becomes more specialized in its ability to help address unique supply chain issues, many industry groups have formed to create a community of businesses working toward the same goal. These groups tend to focus on specific topics or commodities, and commonly offer frameworks to help businesses make sure they’re keeping track of the right metrics. As the landscape of industry groups continues to grow, it’s important to know why they are a key aspect of responsible sourcing. Join Jamie Barsimantov, COO of SupplyShift, as he discusses the role industry groups play in the broader sustainability conversation.

Speakers:
Jamie Barsimantov, Chief Operating Officer, SupplyShift

Panel: Assessment Selection – Standardizing for Scale

If you’ve ever set out on a supply chain assessment process, you know one of the first questions you need to answer is: what am I going to ask my suppliers? Do you create an assessment that’s unique to your business? Or do you leverage the expertise of consultants and industry groups to help you figure out what’s best? It’s likely that businesses will always need to ask certain questions that are unique to their circumstances, but as a rule of thumb, standardization equals scale – for you, for your suppliers, and for your industry at large.

Hear from three leading organizations about how they are moving the standardization process forward in their respective sectors.

Speakers:
Christopher Cooke, Senior Director, The Sustainability Consortium
Alison Edwards, Director, Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops
Rachel Baker, Member Manager, Earthworm Foundation

SupplyShift User Sessions

SupplyShift users are invited to a special half-day of workshops, roadmap presentations, and feedback sessions. Join the SupplyShift team to explore best practices on the platform and learn the direction SupplyShift is headed over the next year.

More sessions on the way

We’ll be confirming more sessions and speakers over the next few weeks. Interested in contributing an idea or speaking at the event? Contact us. https://www.supplyshift.net/contact-us/

Learn more here: https://www.supplyshift.net/events/summit-on-responsible-supply-chains-19/program/

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