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TradeBeyond Enables OBI to Commit to Supply Chain Efficiency and Sustainability 

tradebeyond global trade supply chain council

TradeBeyond Enables OBI to Commit to Supply Chain Efficiency and Sustainability 

Retail’s leading provider of supply chain solutions, TradeBeyond has announced that OBI, Germany’s top DIY brand and a major player in home and garden retail across Europe, has selected TradeBeyond’s multi-enterprise platform for an extensive supply chain digitalization project. TradeBeyond’s industry-leading CBX Suite will help OBI to optimize its supply chain end-to-end, from supplier management to its sourcing, quality, order management, and production processes for their own sourcing organization OBI Group Sourcing (OGS) in Asia. 

Read also: Supply Chain: Challenges and Key Solutions 
 
TradeBeyond will replace OGS’s manual systems with efficient, interoperable cloud-based solutions based on real-time data, allowing the company to bring products to market faster and more cost effectively. The decision to partner with TradeBeyond comes at a crucial time, as OBI seeks to modernize its operations and maintain its competitive edge in a rapidly evolving market while moving beyond analogue systems that create inefficiencies and data re-entry challenges. 
 
OBI’s adoption of TradeBeyond comes as tightening ESG regulations across Europe, including the new German Supply Chain Act (LkSG) and the European Union’s impending Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, are necessitating higher standards and more rigorous data collection from retailers than ever before. These legal requirements align with OBI’s commitment to social responsibility, which is why the company has made ESG an integral part of its future strategy. 

 
“We recognized early that manual supply chain processes were inefficient and no longer up to the task of ensuring the sustainable products that our customers expect,” said Thorsten Bauer, Managing Director and Vice President Asia from OGS. “We were impressed by TradeBeyond’s deep understanding of the complexities of global sourcing, and by the company’s strong presence in Asia. Our partnership with TradeBeyond demonstrates our commitment to a more efficient, responsible supply chain, and to our customers. We’re proud that as we continue to scale, we’ll be able to ensure we do so sustainably.” 
 
“Retailers across the globe, and especially across Europe, are realizing that outdated, legacy supply chain processes fall short in monitoring compliance and managing the mounting complexities created by new global supply chain due diligence laws,” said Tim Chiu, Senior Vice President at TradeBeyond. “By choosing to partner with TradeBeyond, OBI has reinforced its commitment to sourcing to the highest standards of responsibility, while staying at the forefront of supply chain innovation. It’s a privilege working with such a respected, forward-looking retail institution.” 
 
OBI’s implementation of TradeBeyond will unfold in phases over the next year, with the first release set to go live by early 2024. TradeBeyond’s tailored implementations allow brands and retailers to address their greatest needs first so they can realize rapid efficiencies and cost-savings from the platform sooner. 
 
To learn more about how TradeBeyond simplifies global sourcing while supporting growth, contact the company at tradebeyond.com/contact-us
 
About TradeBeyond  

Retail’s leading extended supply chain management solution provider, TradeBeyond, helps brands and retailers streamline product development and sourcing all the way through order, production, and delivery. Through innovative sourcing management, product lifecycle management (PLM), and production and order management solutions, TradeBeyond empowers more efficient, responsible supply chains for many of the world’s largest retailers. TradeBeyond is also the provider of Pivot88, retail’s most trusted quality, compliance, and traceability platform. For more information, visit tradebeyond.com and pivot88.com. 

 
 

About OBI   

  

OBI can help you to design your home creatively and independently. The company’s range includes products and service offerings in the areas of DIY, construction and gardens. OBI’s top priority is empowering you to transform your own home in line with your own wishes, the options available to you and your DIY knowledge and skills. In addition to its bricks-and-mortar stores, OBI uses the heyOBI platform as a means of communicating digitally with customers and providing advice. OBI currently has more than 640 stores across Europe. Alongside its home market in Germany, OBI is also represented in a further nine European countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Italy, Austria, Poland, Switzerland, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czechia and Hungary. OBI is a company within the Tengelmann Group. Further information is available at www.obi.de.   

  

   

OBI media contact    

OBI Group Holding SE & Co. KGaA   
Valentina Wehr  

Albert-Einstein-Str. 7–9   

42929 Wermelskirchen, Germany  

Phone: +49 2196 76 2656  

E-mail: presse@obi.de 

 

economic mapping Global supply strains that started to ease in early 2022 are worsening again as headwinds strengthen from the war in Ukraine and China’s economy

Supply Chain Agility Requires Mapping to the Nth Tier

Too many brands and retailers are struggling to document the complete makeup of their finished products.  A 2021 McKinsey survey found that about half of senior supply chain executives can identify the locations of their tier-one suppliers and the key risks facing those suppliers, but only 2% can do the same for tier-three suppliers and beyond. These companies are operating without end-to-end visibility into their supply chains – a shortcoming that not only puts them on the wrong side of consumer preferences but leaves them vulnerable to disruptions early in the supply chain.

Consumers are demanding more accountability from companies. Shoppers across almost all demographics are increasingly concerned about child labor, dangerous working conditions, deforestation and environmental contamination, and for good reason. With an estimated 16 million victims of forced labor in the private sector, these abuses are more widespread than many realize.

But these shoppers are understandably skeptical about businesses’ commitment to ethical and sustainable sourcing practices. As many as 40% of the environmental promises made about products may be misleading, and shoppers are growing better at sniffing out unsubstantiated claims. Broad descriptors like “free trade” or “green” don’t mean much to these consumers anymore; only one-fifth of consumers say they trust the sustainability claims that brands make. To win their loyalty, brands need to back up their claims about their products. Doing that requires supply chain mapping to document not only their suppliers, but also their suppliers’ suppliers.

Most companies only have complete records of their tier 1 suppliers, but truly responsible sourcing is impossible without visibility into what’s known as tier N, the sub-tier and material-level suppliers that make up the foundation of the supply chain. Because of how nebulous and fragmented the supply chain can be, mapping these Nth-tier suppliers can be a real challenge, but it’s integral for responsible sourcing, since these unilluminated corners are often where the greatest ethical and environmental abuses occur.

Meanwhile, as consumers are requesting greater transparency into the supply chain, governments are requiring it. This summer ; such as the United States’ Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act went into effect. It bans the importation of all goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the region responsible for roughly one-fifth of the world’s cotton supply. The act requires thorough documentation for all Chinese goods entering the United States to prove they were made without slave labor.

                   Supply Chain Mapping is Necessary to Navigate Risks

Other laws across Europe have set out to eliminate unethical labor practices from the supply chain, and more are being introduced by the month. Regulations surrounding sourcing will only continue to tighten. But for brands and retailers facing ongoing pressure to bring products to market as fast as possible, the benefits of supply chain mapping go well beyond mitigating regulatory and reputational risks. Businesses that haven’t mapped their suppliers to at least the fourth tier aren’t agile enough to deal with the kinds of challenges that have become pervasive in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic – among them supply shortages, congested ports, transport delays and surging prices due to inflation.

These hurdles will outlast the pandemic, the latest White House Economic Report warned. That report characterized the supply chain as fundamentally brittle and especially vulnerable to fluctuations in the labor market and natural disasters created by climate change. That should be a particular cause for alarm, given that a recent Harvard Business Review study found that just 11% of suppliers are fully prepared for disruptions due to weather and climate change.

Businesses can navigate these disruptions if they’re agile enough to adjust their procurement and delivery strategies, but that agility hinges on how much visibility they have into their supply lines. When a business encounters a disruption or a problem with production – for instance a supplier that fails a quality inspection – it needs to have the agility to find an alternative quickly.

Supply chain mapping gives businesses the confidence to know whether they’ll be able to meet their quality and compliance targets. And crucially, it helps them address production problems earlier in the process. It’s always easier to stop production earlier as opposed to discovering problems at the end of a run.

Through digitalization, the data that accurate supply chain mapping provides can be used by businesses to conduct in-depth analyses that can identify the root cause of problems during the production process. It can also drive continuous improvement of the production flow, helping to identify inefficiencies, eliminate bottlenecks and speed production. This kind of visibility has always been valuable to brands and retailers, but amid heightened consumer and government scrutiny and mounting concerns about supply chain fragility, it’s more integral than ever.

Author’s Bio

Eric Linxwiler is Senior Vice President of CBX Software. He has over 30 years of experience in enterprise software and cloud-based service companies with a specialty in supply chain optimization and workflow management.