Supplier Sustainability Dashboard

A project case study which demonstrates how we built a supplier sustainability dashboard with Google Cloud for one of our clients

Background

Sustainability initiatives are crucial in today’s world. Organisations, employees and consumers all need to take action. At Cobry, we believe that technology will be a huge part of the solution. So, when one of our clients approached us with an inspiring sustainability project, we were more than a little excited.

As a responsible business, the organisation believes that in order to become more sustainable, it is imperative that they understand the sustainability of their supply chain. 

Project Scoping

The Challenge
Our client was already making strides in understanding their suppliers’ sustainability journey through their supplier onboarding process which included gaining insight into the likes of environmental certifications, sustainability goals and social value efforts. 

However, it became increasingly apparent that this great data wasn’t being used to its full potential. The current state of the information was overwhelming to use, difficult to draw insight from and was not visible across the entire organisation.

So, the team began looking for the most effective way to visualise its supplier sustainability information in order to maintain transparency across the organisation. They believed that by doing so, they would enable employees to make informed decisions regarding the suppliers they are working with. Additionally, the information conveyed by the report would provide the organisation with the ability to better understand and support the sustainable development of their suppliers, whilst also meeting its own sustainability goals.

The solution

When the team came to Cobry with this challenge, we were really excited for two reasons. Firstly, because sustainability is so close to our hearts. And secondly, because we knew that making use of Google’s tools and integrations would provide the perfect solution.

Together, we decided that the best way to display this information was as a dashboard that we would build using Google Cloud's business intelligence solution, Looker. 

In order to do this, we needed a central database to store all of the supplier information. We used BigQuery for this since it can be connected to various different sources and integrates with Looker seamlessly. 

In order to centralise the data, we used Data Flow to ingest into BigQuery, then modelled it using BigQuery's materialised views and LookML. After doing so, were able to query it in real time and present it in an actionable and meaningful way with dashboards in Looker. 

The Results

The tangible result of this exciting project was a highly visual dashboard that would provide valuable analysis and insights relating to the sustainability of the company’s suppliers. However, more inherent than this, are the actions that employees will be able to take as a result of deploying the dashboard. 

With a clear knowledge of the sustainability levels of their suppliers, the organisation is now able to understand how they can best support and empower them in becoming more sustainable. Having only used the dashboard for a short period of time, teams within the organisation have already begun reaping its benefits. For example, the procurement team has identified areas of priority for Sustainable Development Programmes within their supply chain. These include the likes of e-learning modules and knowledge sharing. This initiative reinforces the organisation’s commitment to meeting its own sustainability goals as well as wider societal ones. All of which will contribute to the bigger picture of a more sustainable world. We cannot wait to see what else they achieve with this great initiative! 

We love to overcome challenges here at Cobry and develop new, exciting solutions that just might make a difference. If you have a problem you think we could help you solve, please don’t hesitate to get in touch by booking a discovery call or drop a quick message through the form below!

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