Retailers Gain Control of Their Sustainability Goals as the ESG Storm Clouds Start to Gather Over Operations

Using event-driven architecture (EDA), retailers must link essential data at speed and scale throughout their ecosystems near and far to come to grips with now essential environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting in three key areas.

1. Dead Heading — Optimizing Transportation/Emissions on Every Journey

When it comes to transportation within the retail sector, any type of truck returning to base from scheduled delivery drop-offs either empty or partially full making low-stock journeys contributes to eco inefficiency. These “deadhead” journeys have been recorded to clock up distances of around 34 billion kilometers (21 billion miles), according to European Commission data.

From an immediate perspective, sensors on a truck can monitor fuel and A/C emissions, which then gets uploaded to the cloud. Applications connected through EDA will then monitor and analyze the data to deliver the “greenest route” in real time. This lessens emissions and mitigates the need to shut down the A/C, which has contributed to food waste.

Better control over scheduling and stocking requirements

By event-enabling their entire delivery operation, retailers can view in real time every truck, see the distribution of a global supply chain such as stock availability in other regions, and model alternative scenarios to fulfill orders via other viable routes or delivery mechanisms.

This ability to re-route on-the-fly is a key missing ingredient to both fulfilling ESG and customer expectations. With EDA underpinning operations, retailers can capitalize on up-to-date data to make meaningful scheduling decisions and react much faster to any changes in supply/demand.

2. Food Waste Control — Inside and Outside the Store

The introduction of e-price tags has helped set the stage for grocers to keep wastage under control by enabling them to monitor inventory and adjust prices of batches of inventory on-the-fly to optimize sales and reduce the likelihood of goods wasting away on shelves or counters.

However, monitoring stock in “batch” limits actionability. What if we could monitor at the precise item level? Radio frequency identification (RFID) has evolved in recent years where today these chips can feed more granular data about the item — e.g., when it was shipped, received, put to the shelf, how long it’s been under the heat lamp, etc. This data grants grocers a gold mine of real-time information that, if harvested properly, can best mitigate stock going to waste using measures like timed price reductions.

Addressing Overstocking at Source

From a broader supply chain and inventory management perspective, access to real-time, granular details can also help to analyze sales and inventory patterns to optimize when and how much to order, ensuring the right amount is in the store to meet consumers’ needs. For example, sales of apples may skyrocket in fall, but drop in early winter; adjusting order patterns accordingly will help mitigate stock going to waste in-store. This also works upstream in the supply chain, with these insights pushed back to suppliers to help optimize production.

3. Greener Retail Buildings — Action Now

Given their large physical store footprint, there are direct opportunities to reduce in-store emissions from an energy and utilities perspective. According to McKinsey, to lower emissions, retailers could seek to improve the energy efficiency of stores with LEDs; more efficient heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) motors; heat pumps; on-site solar power generation; and battery energy storage.

Vision for the Future

But today, stores can’t do this at a granular level. In the future, we see a world where you can pre-emptively adjust a store’s “climate” based on weather, customer traffic flows and other factors to help keep emissions low and minimize carbon footprint.

Longer term, data can help to monitor the overall health of a building and score real-time emissions against goals/projections, enabling retailers to adjust and take action based on data-driven insights. EDA will play a significant role here in linking key events to deliver the required data insights needed to track this granular performance.

Ush Shukla is a distinguished engineer at Solace, an enabler of event-driven architecture for real-time enterprises.