Gartner analyst says sustainability increasingly Builds Resilience

Has supply chain sustainability run its course? Many businesses, faced with a seemingly endless torrent of disruptions, challenges and uncertainty over the past few years have put sustainability on the back burner. But, to Sabu Mathai, research director with Gartner’s Supply Chain Practice, sustainability is not a back-burner issue, but rather a mechanism that helps businesses overcome the challenges being presented.

“While turbulence and a lack of bandwidth contribute to this imbalance, so do perceptions that sustainability has marginal value to the business, or that sustainability and resilience are mutually exclusive rather than mutually reinforcing,” he wrote in a recent blog on Gartner.com. “To the contrary, progress on sustainability addresses downside environmental risks, including, for instance, from fast-moving changes in both environmental regulations and the environment itself (e.g., extreme weather, natural resource degradation). And with many supply chain leaders concerned that delayed progress on sustainability could result in lost market share, reaching for sustainability’s opportunities is crucial to mitigating risks and securing a better future for the business. Today, sustainability increasingly builds resilience.”

Mathai went on to argue that sustainability should remain core to business and pointed to Gartner research that found companies that “build in” sustainability at their core, rather than “bolting on” sustainability at the margins were more likely to see sustainability-related success.

“Leaders in build-in companies say their firms are 3.7 times less likely to deprioritize sustainability than leaders from bolt-on companies who face nearly equal rates of disruption,” he wrote.

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