AWS Supply Chain simplifies ESG data compliance

Organizations face a complex challenge in maintaining sustainability compliance across their vast, global supply chains. Managing complex regulatory requirements, collecting data from suppliers worldwide, and auditing that data for accuracy using traditional email and fragmented messaging tools proves inefficient and error-prone. As organizations navigate the modern supply chain landscape, embracing digital and physical transformations will be crucial for enhancing resilience, optimizing costs, and driving sustainable growth. They must also address sustainability reporting and compliance requirements and improve existing data collection processes. Amazon’s Global Trade and Product Compliance (GTPC) team, responsible for validating AWS data center hardware for regulatory compliance, has achieved substantial success by leveraging AWS Supply Chain Sustainability. The improved trading partner interactions, streamlined data collection process, and detailed data request compliance tracking will save GTPC approximately 3,000 operational hours per year.

The current email and manual approaches have several key challenges:

1. Data security vulnerabilities: Not adhering to requirements risks exposing sensitive data to potential breaches.
2. Fragmented coordination: Separate team members requesting data from suppliers leads to duplicate requests, missed requests, delayed responses, and inefficient workload distribution.
3. Disjointed communication: Email threads make it difficult to maintain coherent conversations about documentation requests, causing miscommunication and delays in acquiring data.
4. Lack of metrics: Inability to track metrics like documentation collection progress and supplier response times impedes performance monitoring and process improvements.

AWS Supply Chain Sustainability simplifies the process of requesting, collecting, and auditing ESG data from all suppliers and trading partners. You can easily distribute data collection forms, requesting details like product life cycle assessments, certificates on product safety standards, reports on hazardous materials used, and more. Suppliers fill out the forms, and their responses are collected in a secure, auditable repository. This streamlined approach eliminates challenges of compliance data scattered across email threads and file folders. You can access emissions, materials, and other regulatory data in a centralized location for streamlined reporting, audits, and analysis.

This centralized model enhances data protection, eliminates redundant data, and enables flexible workload allocation. It facilitates structured communication to reduce delays and allows comprehensive tracking for data-driven optimization. By unifying fragmented data and processes, AWS Supply Chain delivers a single source of truth, improving visibility, collaboration, and operational efficiency. It replaces manual, email-driven processes with centralized data collection and reporting, improving operational efficiency, compliance adherence, and collaborative supplier relationships—fostering an ecosystem for mutual growth and success.

This blog post describes how GTPC implemented AWS Supply Chain Sustainability to improve their process for gathering sustainability compliance artifacts and provides a step-by-step guide on using the solution.

Amazon GTPC eliminates significant manual efforts

The GTPC team validates AWS data center hardware for regulatory compliance and collaborates with suppliers and test labs to gather the mandatory documentation. They typically gather thousands of compliance artifacts and expect the number to grow considerably annually. The GTPC team has achieved substantial success using AWS Supply Chain Sustainability.

“GTPC is using AWS Supply Chain Sustainability module to manage and keep an audit history of the collection of compliance artifacts from AWS suppliers. The Sustainability module is an efficient and user-friendly tool which helps us avoid duplicate communications with partners and data requests for a specific part number, and provide real-time status of requests to the whole team. It additionally improves the supplier experience as they are able to view all compliance artifacts needed from them in a single view.” Nishant Jain, Sr. Manager Certifications, GTPC.

The improved trading partner interactions, streamlined data collection process and detailed data request compliance tracking will save GTPC approximately 3,000 operational hours per year.

GTPC’s successful implementation of AWS Supply Chain Sustainability demonstrates the solution’s effectiveness in streamlining compliance data collection, enhancing supplier collaboration, and driving operational efficiencies. With these compelling benefits, you can replicate GTPC’s success by adopting AWS Supply Chain Sustainability for your own sustainability reporting and compliance needs.

The next section provides a step-by-step guide on how to set up and start using AWS Supply Chain Sustainability to transform your sustainability data management processes.

Prerequisites

For this blog post, it is assumed that you understand the use of the mentioned services and you have the following prerequisites:

1. You have an Amazon Web Services. Inc. (AWS) account. If you don’t have an account, you can follow the step-by-step instructions provided in the account activation guide.
2. You will also need an AWS Supply Chain account. If you’re not already a customer, visit the AWS Supply Chain website for more information and to sign-up.

Streamline compliance with AWS Supply Chain Sustainability

For clarity, this blog refers to two user types utilizing AWS Supply Chain Sustainability. Requesters are the individuals that manage the compliance documentation process, such as GTPC in this case. Partners are the suppliers and vendors that provide parts, materials, or goods who must complete documentation requests from requesters. The following sections outline the defined user experience and configuration settings for both the requester and partner roles.

The Sustainability dashboard is the main application screen where requesters can review their trading partner’s onboarding and any artifact data requests statuses. The following screenshot displays a sample dashboard.

The first page includes a Getting Started overview and a Partner Overview section with key onboarding metrics. The Onboarding metrics summarize trading partner onboarding status by stage. Data requests summarize the status of artifact collection requests. In the example screenshot, the requesting organization has a 38% partner onboarding success rate and 30% response rate for artifact data requests. This allows requesters to prioritize partner onboarding and request follow-up activities.

Requesters follow three steps to request compliance reporting documents: 1) invite trading partners, 2) create artifact data requests, and 3) review trading partner response.

Requester interaction and processes

Step 1: Inviting trading partners

As a requester, you can add a trading partner in two ways. You can manually add the trading partner information by entering information directly in the partner overview screen. You can also ingest the trading partner’s information into the Supply Chain Data Lake (SCDL) if their information is maintained in an external supply chain management system. These options provide flexibility to add new and existing trading partners. Once added, you will need to invite your trading partners to solicit artifact data requests to them. The invitation process ensures the trading partner approves the bidirectional communication through AWS Supply Chain. This enables simplified management of trading partner business workflows and is required for the trading partner to view and respond to any artifact collection request. The trading partner invitation screen is shown below.

Step 2: Create data requests

As a requester, you can choose the data request type to send to your trading partners as shown in the following screenshot. You can choose the simple reporting template or use a saved template from the previous data requests. Once you select a data request type, you will enter key reporting parameters like request name, description, and data request details. You can also choose to configure the response format and provide detailed guidance for your trading partners to follow.

Step 3: Review trading partner responses

As a requester, you will see all initiated data requests with key milestones on the Sustainability page under Data Request. This is shown in the following screenshot. You can then choose the specific data request by clicking on the link and review the trading partner’s submission. You can evaluate the efficacy of the artifacts, the completeness of the request, communicate any additional requests, or request additional information directly from the application.

Trading partner interaction and processes

This next section will cover the trading partner role and interaction with the application. Trading partners will be able to respond to artifact collection requests with two steps: 1) review and accept the requester’s invite, and 2) review and respond to data requests.

Step 1: Review and accept the requester’s invite

As a trading partner, you will receive an email to join AWS Supply Chain and accept the requester’s invite for data collection collaboration. You will then be able to setup your profile by completing the onboarding process. Requesters are notified once onboarding is complete and you have accepted the collaboration invite. Requesters will be able to send data collection requests.

Step 2: Review or respond to data request

As a trading partner, you will receive a digest email summarizing all data requests you need to complete. Then, you can click on the email links that connect to the artifact data requests screen where they can view all pending requests. You can also directly navigate to the artifact data requests page to view the open data requests as shown below and provide the necessary information. You can also choose to decline the request and document the applicable reason code. The requesters review the data request submissions and end the workflow if all the responses are complete.

Additional information and details about Sustainability setup and configurations can be found in the AWS Supply Chain user guide.

AWS Supply Chain Sustainability provided the following benefits to address GTPC’s challenges.

1. Seamless communication: AWS Supply Chain enabled seamless communication between GTPC and their suppliers and trading partners enabling in-depth conversations and timely responses.
2. Improved visibility: GTPC minimized effort duplication and maximized resource utilization leading to time savings within their workflow. This visibility improved transparency and accountability, identified sustainable practices improvement ideas, mitigated regulatory non-compliance risks.
3. Auditable communication: AWS Supply Chain facilitated auditable communication between the GTPC and their trading partners, ensuring a clear record of interactions and exchanges.
4. Improved security compliance: AWS Supply Chain effectively simplified the exchange of critical artifacts through the application and provided a secure and reliable method to transfer data. GTPC also had an auditable record of the data and unprecedented visibility of the data collection and verification processes.
5. Performance tracking: GTPC was able to track artifact collection progress and supplier response times and adjust their data requests if required to. This type of visibility and control of the process ensured GTPC was aware of any changes, challenges, or issues with their trading partner network that would affect their regulatory compliance progress.

Conclusion

As consumers and regulatory bodies demand greater transparency and accountability, organizations face mounting pressure to gather accurate and comprehensive sustainability data across their operations and supply chains. Obtaining reliable data from trading partner networks is essential for driving meaningful analysis, informing strategic decisions, and enabling compliance with evolving sustainability standards and regulations. However, many businesses struggle with inefficient manual processes and fragmented data sources.

By leveraging AWS Supply Chain Sustainability, Amazon’s Global Trade and Product Compliance (GTPC) team successfully streamlined their compliance data collection process. GTPC, responsible for gathering thousands of artifacts annually, achieved substantial improvements in operational efficiency by adopting the centralized, automated solution. The improved trading partner interactions, streamlined data collection, and detailed compliance tracking will save GTPC approximately 3,000 operational hours per year.

GTPC’s success demonstrates the transformative impact AWS Supply Chain Sustainability can have on sustainability data management processes. The solution’s centralized approach eliminates challenges associated with scattered data, disjointed communication, and lack of visibility, while enhancing supplier collaboration and operational efficiency. With these compelling benefits, you can drive similar improvements by adopting AWS Supply Chain Sustainability for your sustainability reporting and compliance needs.

Visit AWS Supply Chain to learn more about fostering an ecosystem for mutual growth and success through sustainable business practices.