Key terms
The vocabulary, defined
Supply chain sustainability runs on terms that sound precise and are used loosely. These are the definitions the programme works from, including the distinction between compliance and transformation instruments that most of the argument rests on.
- Sustainable supply chain transformation
- Structural change that embeds environmental and social responsibility into the operating logic of a supply chain, making responsible conduct necessary rather than voluntarily maintained. It is distinguished from sustainability programmes that add reporting and verification on top of an unchanged system.See also: Compliance instrument, Transformation instrument
- Compliance instrument
- A mechanism that states a standard, records its acceptance and allocates liability for breach. Supplier codes of conduct, attestations and most audit programmes are compliance instruments. They change who is accountable when something goes wrong.See also: Transformation instrument
- Transformation instrument
- A mechanism that changes what is operationally possible or economically rational for a supplier, such as contract terms that fund a standard, sourcing criteria that weight it, or information infrastructure that makes conditions beyond tier one visible. It changes whether something goes wrong.See also: Compliance instrument
- Roundtable on Sustainable Palm OilRSPO
- A multi-stakeholder certification scheme setting standards for palm oil production. Its resource requirements are a recognised barrier to smallholder participation, which is the subject of the programme's published work on converting certification from a punitive to a preventive model.See also: MSPO, Smallholder exclusion
- Malaysian Sustainable Palm OilMSPO
- Malaysia's national certification standard for sustainable palm oil production, mandatory for producers in that jurisdiction. Like other standards-based schemes it verifies conditions at a point in time rather than continuously.See also: RSPO
- Smallholder exclusion
- The systematic effect by which the cost of certification, documentation, record-keeping systems, technical knowledge and working capital, filters producers by size rather than by conduct, leaving the segment supplying much of global volume outside the scheme.See also: RSPO
- Chain of custody
- The documented path a material takes from origin to finished product. Chain of custody models differ in how strictly they keep certified and uncertified material apart, and that choice determines what a sustainability claim on the finished product actually asserts.See also: Mass balance, Traceability
- Mass balance
- A chain of custody model permitting certified and uncertified material to be physically mixed, provided certified volumes entering the system are matched by certified volumes claimed leaving it. It supports a claim about the volume purchased, not about the material in any particular product.See also: Chain of custody
- Traceability
- The ability to establish where a material physically originated, as distinct from establishing which counterparty supplied it. Most procurement systems record the commercial relationship accurately and the geographic origin not at all, which is the root of most supply chain reputation exposure.See also: Chain of custody, Supply chain opacity
- Supply chain opacity
- The condition in which a brand can describe its direct suppliers in detail but can say little about the conditions or origin further upstream. It accumulates from individually reasonable decisions about intermediaries, commodity mixing and data models.See also: Traceability, Reputation risk
- Reputation risk
- In a supply chain context, the exposure created when an external party can establish facts about a company's sourcing that the company itself cannot. The research programme argues for treating it as a core variable in supplier selection rather than a communications matter handled after the fact.See also: Supply chain opacity
- Scope 3 emissions
- Indirect greenhouse gas emissions occurring in a company's value chain, upstream and downstream, outside its owned or controlled operations. For most consumer-facing businesses these dominate the total footprint, which is why supply chain transformation and climate strategy are the same problem.
- Situational Crisis Communication TheorySCCT
- A framework relating the attribution of responsibility in a crisis to the response strategies available to an organisation. It is the theoretical grounding of the EcoCrisis simulation, where participants' decisions are assessed against SCCT-prescribed leadership.See also: EcoCrisis
- Big data analytics in auditingBDA
- The use of large-scale continuous data collection and analysis in place of periodic inspection, allowing assurance to be continuous rather than sampled. The programme's published work maps the critical barriers to its adoption using Interpretive Structural Modelling.
- Interpretive Structural ModellingISM
- A method for identifying relationships between variables in a complex system and arranging them into a hierarchy, distinguishing factors that drive others from those that are dependent. Used in the programme's research to map barriers to analytics-based auditing.
Enquiries
Talk to the researchers
The initiative takes enquiries on its findings, its teaching materials, and collaboration. Correspondence reaches the authors, not an account team.