How data and efficiency can drive sustainability

Meeting the needs of regulators, consumers and trading partners for greener products and services requires companies to move towards circular and more sustainable value chains. Driving efficiency and reducing waste across those values chains is a significant part of a business’ effort to reduce their environmental impact and to reach their decarbonisation goals.

Under the three pillars of sustainability – Environment, Social & Governance (ESG) – sit several areas to be addressed. Those areas look at how a business is run and managed, and how it relates to its social community, locally and globally. While many businesses focus their attention initially on headline areas such as the carbon footprint of their transport and logistics processes, to changing the type and quantity of packaging, there
are other, possibly more lowkey ways of making your business more economically sustainable.

Reducing the amount of paper used in a business and switching to electronic forms of communication – for orders, invoices and delivery dockets, for example, is one way of reducing the amount of paper and ink consumed in a business, as well as the cost of the physical storage of those paper files.

Adopting new ways of doing business electronically increases efficiency and accuracy and reduces the human-related costs of manual paper pushing, freeing up employee time for more value-add activities. Consider the adoption of EDI – Electronic Data Interchange – and switching to electronic and automated forms of business document management as part of your drive towards being a more sustainable business.

The master data challenge
One of the first challenges in terms of sustainability and circularity lies in obtaining information from upstream suppliers of goods, services and raw materials – this includes everything from components and supplies to packaging and energy.

The second part of that challenge is to ensure that information is accurate, complete and up to date; that the data quality is high. Collecting this information is not unfortunately a one-off exercise, so the process needs to be efficient with the minimum of manual human intervention in its collection, cleansing and standardisation. This is an area that GS1 data standards can support in terms of data definitions and data interoperability.

Challenges present new opportunities

Evolving a business to be more circular and sustainable presents an opportunity to adapt to new business processes and workflows and to incorporate sustainability data management as part of ongoing digital  transformation initiatives. Across many industry sectors businesses today leverage barcode scanning to enable automatic data capture, which is fast, accurate and economically effective.

New 2-dimensional (2D) barcode types including Data Matrix and QR codes offer ways to share information about products, assets, locations and more, in a quick, accurate and cost-effective manner. Combining these 2D barcodes with data sharing standards including GS1 Digital Link opens a new world of possibilities to create multiple connections between products, consumers, and regulators.

By scanning 2D barcodes:

• Trade customers and consumers can find the fuller story behind products – where they originated, what they contain and where they have been during their supply chain journey
• 2D barcodes can help retailers to easily record and track products by batch or serial number
• Regulators can identify, validate and count products for recycling schemes and regulatory compliance purposes. Meeting the expectations of customers will require next-level product data management capabilities across the value chain.

Today GS1 standards provide a trusted and proven way for organisations to identify and trace companies, locations, products and more, to support their sustainability and circular economy initiatives.

Over 3,700 organisations in Ireland use GS1’s global standards to help manage the sharing of product and sales information along their supply chains. GS1 data standards help to connect data repositories and to break open data silos within and between organisations.

Maximise the benefits of GS1 standards adoption
Consider these four steps to ensure you maximise the benefits to your business by fully deploying GS1 standards

1. Ensure every single product sold in-store or online has its own unique digital identity with a GTIN (Global Trade Item Number)
2. Connect all newly issued digital product identities to the GS1 Global Product Registry so trading partners and other stakeholders can check the data using Verified by GS1
3. Use a single, multi-purpose 2D barcode encoded with GS1 standards to unlock a range of ways to deliver new experiences to consumers and to improve business operations.
4. Use GS1 data sharing standards to ensure reliable and complete information gets to everyone who needs it and to support transparent and traceable supply chains.

Sean Dennison, GS1 Ireland

Contact GS1 Ireland today to learn more www.gs1ie.org/standards/intelligent-barcodes