Did you know that a business’s carbon footprint is about more than just recycling initiatives and reducing air travel?
In fact, day-to-day activities like unread emails and cloud usage can generate around 150 grams of extra carbon dioxide per employee per year. Because of this, businesses need to take a more proactive and expansive approach to sustainability.
For many, sustainability begins in the negotiation phase. By eliminating paper and manual processes with gicom, retailers and CPGs can become more efficient and reduce their carbon footprint. What’s more, gicom also allows retailers to track sustainability scores and KPIs from vendor transactions. As such, retailers can consider sustainable products and practices during key negotiations. With climate change top of mind, gicom can help retailers and CPGs find new ways to be sustainable.
How gicom’s Solutions Reduce Waste
Gone are the days of needing printed contracts and file transfers to acquire signed agreements. gicom has transformed the agreement lifecycle process to be completely digitized from end-to-end.
When organized manually, agreement management requires tremendous paperwork and back-and-forth emailing. But gicom automatically pulls all the data, contracts and historical information necessary for a successful agreement and shares it with all parties via a secure and easy-to-use interface.
Storing this data and relevant information in a database has multiple perks:
- The reduction of printed contracts saves money and trips to the office supply store for ink and paper.
- Old contracts from previous deals or those that were never finalized no longer have to be stored on-site or sent to the nearest landfill, reducing waste tremendously.
- The digitized process removes risk of version confusion, which improves agreement accuracy and efficiency.
Furthermore, with SAP S/4HANA for Agreement Profitability and Negotiation by gicom, entire condition contracts can be created automatically. By removing manual processes that are prone to errors, vendor collaborations can be up and moving much quicker – enhancing a retailer’s agility when it comes to withstanding the fast-moving retail industry.
Tracking Sustainability Goals With gicom
While profitability is of course a top priority for retailers, other KPIs are also crucial to business success, including sustainability.
With gicom’s Real-Time Margin solution and the SAP S/4 HANA integration, retailers can track a variety of criteria across supplier’s contracts and conditions including sustainability scores. The solution dashboard showcases how margins, prices, vendor supply and sales turnover interact. This increases transparency of decisions surrounding which sustainable products will be listed in the retailer’s assortment.
In addition to supplier management tools, gicom allows retailers and CPGs to monitor their negotiated conditions with suppliers, ranging from price agreements to environmental standards. Worldwide, supply chain transparency is becoming a more important issue as countries push for a more sustainable future. For example in a a February 2022 ruling the EU Commission adopted a proposal for a Directive on corporate sustainability due diligence with the aim to enhance sustainable and responsible corporate behavior.
Therefore with gicom, businesses have more transparency over compliance on sustainability KPIs. Retailers or CPGs can thus compare and track more consistently and understand how business partners might impact profit margins and sustainability scores.
gicom Helps Retailers Be Future-Focused
Retailers can no longer push sustainability to the back burner. According to Acosta Research, 65% of consumers want retailers to invest more in sustainability, but these demands can be concerning for retailers already dealing with tight margins. Sustainability is an investment. However, with gicom, retailers can impress eco-conscious customers while simultaneously improving business productivity and profitability. To learn more, reach out to us today. We’d be happy to discuss how gicom can help you reach your goals – both for sustainability and for your bottom line.