Sourcing locally can lead to a diverse supply chain with lower costs and a decreased carbon footprint. All whilst having a positive impact on local communities. When choosing suppliers to source from, try looking into your local area. Local sourcing benefits include a diverse array of suppliers, often increasing the women owned businesses in your supply chain. When sourcing locally you often have the opportunity to work with a diverse range of local businesses and small businesses, including those that are women-owned or minority owned.
Delivery and shipments throughout your supply chain can create a huge amount of pollution to the environment. By sourcing locally, you are automatically decreasing carbon emissions through lower transport and travel. Transporting via ship, plane, truck or any other fuelled vehicle is one of the worst environmental offenders in the supply chain. With lower emissions, your company will become more sustainable and ethical. Environmentally friendly companies are more attractive to customers, employees and shareholders. Keeping your sourcing and procuring close by is a realistic solution to a lower carbon footprint. Not only this, it’s also a time saver, less transport means faster production!
Faster production is just one business benefit of local sourcing. Reducing logistics and transport costs decreases overall supply chain costs. It is often thought that outsourcing production overseas will be a money saver. But it is often more costly than expected. Transport is not only highly polluting, but also highly expensive. Sourcing locally means less transport costs. If anything goes wrong in your supply chain, management of the issue is much easier at a local level. As well as communication with your suppliers, who are in the same time zone with the same language. Efficient and effective supply chain management is more achievable when you can be in direct contact with your suppliers.
The local community can be greatly benefitted from the investment by businesses. Supporting local businesses will increase economic productivity in the area. Increased revenue for the local region, and more economically empowered people, could potentially mean more business!
Ben and Jerry’s, the multinational ice cream company, proudly sources their dairy from local farmers in Vermont, USA. Since its inception, Ben and Jerry’s has always been a vocal advocate for social justice causes, such as gender equality. Reducing their environmental impact is of great importance to them, so they have collaborated with over 250 dairy farmers in North America and Europe to lower their transport emissions. By sourcing locally to their production points, they have also managed to support women owned businesses by actively seeking out female suppliers, such as dairy farmers in the Vermont area. As well investing heavily in black-owned suppliers to boost economic support for business people of colour in their sourcing and procuring. Ethical business practices and advocacy is a vital part of their brand, and has only helped them in becoming one of the most successful ice cream companies in the world. Source local, not global, and see the positive impacts on business, people and the planet.