Google Cloud recently began allowing its customers to partake of a sustainability tool that provides insight into how organizations can reduce the environmental impact of their supply chains. 

The new supply chain sustainability assessment tool was expanded to customers in April. It utilizes detailed data insights and tools like machine learning and satellite imagery to develop models on how to track and act upon supply chain metrics. 

The first step in the assessment process is to identify emission hot spots in an organization’s supply chain. “In order to do that, you need more visibility and more data of what's happening across that supply chain,” Google Cloud Sustainability Lead Chris Talbott told SDxCentral in an interview. 

“​​One of the biggest challenges [organizations] face is visibility across the entire supply chain,” Talbott said. That’s the crux of what Google Cloud’s assessment provides: data insights to help an organization identify where the environmental impacts of its supply chain are greatest. 

After the supply chain is reviewed and issues are identified, the next step is to prioritize “those areas where technology could have the largest impact on the supply chains,” Talbott said. Organizations can then put that technology into practice to manage supply chain impacts.

Aside from mitigating the climate crisis, there are other advantages to conducting sustainable business practices. “Sustainability benefits are often hand-in-hand with cost and efficiency benefits as well,” Talbott said. “More often than not, efficiency means not only emissions benefits but cost benefits to those organizations as well.”

United Parcel Service (UPS) has used Google Cloud’s supply chain sustainability assessment tool to reap environmental and financial benefits. One of the obvious emissions hot spots for UPS is its fleet of delivery trucks. 

To lower emissions from its deliveries, UPS uses Google Maps technology and machine learning to build a model that recommends the most efficient delivery routes. 

“It helps them reduce the amount of gasoline that they're consuming on an annual basis by 10 million gallons,” Talbott said. That saves roughly 200 million pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) from entering the atmosphere per year. “And that is also a cost benefit,” Talbott added.

Google also works with Unilever on reducing its environmental impact from sourcing materials. Many of Unilever’s products use palm oil, an edible vegetable oil harvested from the fruit of oil palm trees.

Nearly half of packaged products found in grocery stores use a form of palm oil, and its production is a large contributor to deforestation. Sourcing palm oil in a responsible way “requires a lot of data about what's happening [from] a global perspective,” Talbott said. 

Technology has an interesting role to play in helping companies like Unilever make better decisions about sourcing upfront materials used in its supply chain, Talbott said. “It requires satellite imagery to understand where your particular vendors that you're sourcing from are [located] in relation to areas that are at risk of deforestation, and it requires tools to take those datasets and give insights to the teams at Unilever [who] are making those sourcing decisions.”

This program meets increased customer demand as more companies begin to consider environmental sustainability and take action to reduce negative impacts. According to Talbott, Google is fielding increasing requests to use technology to address environmental challenges and meet sustainability targets. 

“It's pretty incredible to see the explosion in commitment and ambition to sustainability efforts across industries and across our customers,” Talbott said.