Company Profile
IETP
IETP launches new program to help the global toy industry achieve environmental ambitions In collaboration with the toy industry, IETP has developed an Environmental Assessment Program, which will enable companies to gather environmental metrics cost-effectively and efficiently. Todd Merton, head of Business Development, tells us more. Sustainability and procurement professionals need better information to identify the positive and negative environmental impacts of their products. Through better information, companies can identify opportunities to improve and ensure they are a positive participant in the global fight to address climate change. Knowing more about the environmental impacts of your products helps you to identify opportunities, as well as risks, to gather information for internal or external ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) reporting, and informs your business, helping you develop strategic plans to support growth. When it comes to environmental responsibility, we know that it is not enough to look within your organization alone. Responsible companies also need to understand the performance of their supply chain partners and be able to communicate the performance and progress of their businesses’ activities and impacts on the communities where they operate. The toy industry challenged IETP to provide support that would enable small and medium-sized companies to better utilize their limited human and financial resources to actively contribute to the global effort to address climate change. In response, we developed the Environmental Assessment Module. This new module is designed to enable companies of any size to understand the environmental performance of their supply chain, to better develop their sustainability strategy, and by using supply chain operational data, to join forces with the rest of the world in combatting climate change. In our development we have responded to the specific challenges the industry told us they were facing:
Challenge 1: How to collect environmental metrics efficiently, how to reduce the time & effort required to gather this data? It is a daunting task, especially if you are manually collecting and sorting data across countless emails between you and your global suppliers. Reading through long email chains, losing track of the most recent documents received, trying to ensure you are updating and storing this information in the right folders for future use, is not the most efficient use of your time. Data collection is a time-consuming task. As we
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started our product development it was agreed that a core objective would be to enable companies to spend more time analyzing data which could be used to inform their strategic plans and take action, instead of spending huge amounts of time, and money, on the data gathering process. We wanted to enable positive impact through efficient data collection. To tackle this issue, the simple answer was to go digital. An online assessment that allows your suppliers to efficiently share their information using drop-down options, anytime and anywhere. Online tools allow you to collect environmental
