It’s common for procurement professionals to just fall into supply chain. How did it happen for you?
I guess I fall into the same camp. I came into supply chain through engineering. I started as an electrochemical engineer, working on energy systems. My master’s is in hydrogen economy, fuel cells, batteries, things like that.
However, I’ve always been in operations. My co-op during my bachelor’s degree was in operations engineering in a chemical coating company. My dad was a plant manager, so I was always walking the floor and looking at machines and thinking they were really cool in a manufacturing sense.
I didn’t really understand much about it until my first role coming out of my master’s program. I was heavily involved with the supply chain team. I worked with quality and sourcing for scaling up production of a component that we had. I had this realisation where that bottleneck in innovation isn’t necessarily the technology itself. You can make the technology work with all of the engineers and the scientists working hard together, but it’s the systems and the relationships that move materials, products, and ideas from prototype to production. Technology can only succeed when the supply chains are ready to carry that into production and scale that. And I found that very interesting. That’s when I felt I was way more interested in the nuances of supply chain than engineering. I liked being a part of the system that made something successful.
Tell me a bit about the Circular Supply Chain Network and what it does.
The Circular Supply Chain Network was started a few years ago by Deborah Dull. She is a thought leader and world renowned speaker on circular supply chains. I really admire her. She’s written a couple of books and she works with the ASCM (Association for Supply Chain Management). She’s wonderful and brilliant, and her idea was to create a global community that’s dedicated to re-imagining supply chains as circular systems.
We bring together practitioners, innovators, leaders, and we share tools, frameworks, and stories for making circularity practical and actionable. We do that through education, peer exchange, thought leadership, speaking events, pilot projects, and so on. We work on grants when appropriate as well, and we’ll go to events and host workshops. We hold and share toolkits and training information, and we participate in accelerator type initiatives.
Can you tell me about the sessions you led at CHAINge North America earlier this year?
That was great. I really loved my time at CHAINge this year. I did a couple of things. On the first day, I worked with Deborah and she brought in some members of the Circular Supply Chain Network for us to co-facilitate her workshop. Her workshop was really fun. It was called Reboot, Repair, Reimagine the Circular Supply Chain. We were talking in this workshop about the companies that are actually implementing advanced circular supply chain solutions, to show that it’s not science fiction. They are truly who’s leading the way right now, and we discussed the steps you can take in your own company to benchmark against them or to lead yourself to these types of success. It was really fun being a part of that and working with Deborah side-by-side.
I also co-presented with Samer AlMadhoon, Managing Partner at Muhakat Institute. He had a sustainability talk and I had a circularity talk, and we worked together in our presentation. It was called Sustainability in Action: Bringing Circularity and Best Practices to Life in Your Supply Chain. I led the audience through what a circular supply chain is, and a roundtable the next day to follow up on that, and find out people’s struggles.
That brought up some really hard conversations and a lot of pain that I think supply chain professionals understand. Maybe they feel that sometimes they’re not listened to, or there’s still companies where the supply chain is supposed to manage costs and they don’t necessarily have a seat at the table.
How do sustainability and circularity differ, and how can we shine more of a spotlight on circularity?
That’s definitely challenging. If you look at sustainability, it’s the goal. It’s the big picture; it’s people, planet, profit, and circularity is a tool. Circularity is purely about material flows. It’s about how we keep the raw materials, the products, the energy that’s used in these processes in play for as long as possible. Circularity doesn’t cover water use, labour conditions, equity; it’s very focused on the materials themselves. However, circularity is also one way of getting to the sustainability boundaries, essentially. And that’s the interesting thing.
Circularity itself is huge for economic value because it is value retention, it’s material flow, and keeping those materials in play with as little effort and waste as possible. If we think of lean manufacturing and waste in that aspect of wanting as minimal waste as possible, that’s true in circularity as well. But then how do you take these waste streams and extract more value out of them? How do you protect the value of the materials and the products that you’re working with? How do you keep as much of the shell of your product going for as long as possible with minimal effort? Those are the aspects of circularity that I think need more attention and understanding.
Besides a lack of conversation around the topic, what are the biggest challenges in circularity?
I think part of it is there are very large companies that are implementing circular practices. A lot of the heavy duty equipment companies have figured out how to make their very large, very expensive machines have new life, so they have whole remanufacturing plants. And that’s great, but these large companies have something a small company doesn’t: a huge supply chain ecosystem.
Circularity isn’t really a single company solution – it takes that ecosystem. You need your suppliers, you need your customers, you need to be able to get back to your material. It needs policy makers. It needs communities working together, reverse logistics, and local infrastructure – our big missing links in circular supply chains. Without them, it doesn’t matter. The loop stays broken if you’re not able to get back your material and do something meaningful with it.
And the thing is, it’s also really hard for companies to understand the value in making those short loops, even though it’s less risky and more resilient to have share and reuse remanufacturing processes that are close and local, so you can keep those materials in circulation longer. That is a huge shift where companies are so much more used to obsolescence, like you want your product to fall apart so that somebody will come and buy a new one. So it is that business model of getting into the mindset of there actually being revenue to be had. Mindset is key.
- Sustainable Procurement