It’s time for companies to rethink their Net Zero strategies and make time to properly understanding what the business does today and decide on what it wants to do in the future. If this happens then we stand a chance at achieving Net Zero at some point in the future.

It requires reform of the current Sustainability teams by including people that truly understand the business and are empowered to make decisions. It’s time for the business to take ownership of this activity properly and drive positive, meaningful change. The current model is a case of the tail wagging the dog, and at a significant cost.

Most of today’s supply chains have evolved around a revenue growth story and focused on a speed and cost dynamic. To crack Net Zero, and for that matter many of the other modern business challenges, they need to transition to a model that considers a much wider set of variables including what is produced and where, the manufacturing process and how goods are transported across the various stages of the supply chain. We can address concentration, political, economic and tariff risks at the same time if we are smart about it.

The cost of carbon mitigants needs to be factored into the unit price of goods at the procurement level but to achieve this, a total understanding of the supply chain is required. Not many companies have this data so committing significant resource and capital to Sustainability teams is premature.

A delegate from procurement, operations, product, sales and finance are required to make this work going forwards. The talented academics and scientists are still required but they are unable to challenge the business in the right way. It goes back to the concept of “five why’s” - it removes the noise and quickly uncovers the route cause.

Failing to take control of this now poses a uncontrollable future profitability risk as fine margins could be eroded by the need for unnecessary carbon mitigation actions.

Many companies are also making the mistake of approaching Net Zero as a project. Unless your company can maintain a position of zero carbon production, Net Zero is a variable that will continue to shift and change as the business plots its future course. Net Zero needs to be seen as a new way of doing business and to think it is “done” or “ticked off” is a storing a potential issue for the future.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. Whilst many supply chains are finely tuned effective machines today, their intrinsic inefficiencies provide ample opportunity to optimise environmental impact with, quite often, low implementation complexity.

Your company is potentially sitting on a lot of the information that will point you in the right direction but the way the sustainability teams are configured, you are unable to see the opportunity in front of you.

Net Zero might be one of the most complex activities in modern corporate history but it can be turned into a once in a life time opportunity to redesign legacy supply chains, so they are fit for purpose in tomorrow’s world.

The biggest hurdle that corporates have to get over in order to get back on track is deciding who is brave enough to take this on. The CFO is the ideal owner as they will be ultimately be responsible for the accuracy of the carbon disclosure figures that appear in regulatory filings, and also they will have a vested interest in ensuring the business is not destroying fine margins by purchasing unnecessary carbon mitigation actions. Cross department collaboration is critical to achieve the right outcome and this was going to require alignment of C-Suite KPI’s.

If you want to understand more about how we see this area, please feel free to reach out and I’d be happy to talk you through it. As a holistic challenge, this is big but it can be effectively broken down into bite sized chunks and tackled in a manageable way.

Its time to take control of Net Zero and make it work for your business. If your business sees Net Zero as a cost we need to talk. We can help you turn this around and get you on the right road for a 45% reduction in carbon by 2030. It is still possible.