Today we take a closer look at our segment analysis of Supply Chain Management. When looking at all segments compared to each other, Supply Chain Visibility and Process Optimization are the most dominant topics amongst the 215 Startups that were included in The Supply Chain Management Startups Handbook.
While „Process Management“ in the meaning of leaner, more efficient business processes, is a somehow natural aspect of innovation and startup mindset, the growing role of visibility caught our attention. Combined with Traceability and Supply Chain Risk Management that gives us roughly 30% of all mentions that went towards increasing transparency of supply chains. Looking at the numbers of companies addressing at least one of these segments the picture is even clearer. More than half of the companies (120; 55%) provide a product or service helping to increase transparency along the Supply Chain.
Transparency means fighting the negative impacts of the evolution of global Supply Chains such as for instance to violations of human and labour rights like forced labour or child labour, corruption, or environmental damage. While a focus on these topics is for sure also enhanced by political actions like the EU’s push towards new Supply Chain law or national laws like Germany’s Supply Chain due diligence act, enforcing more due diligence on supply chains, we believe that especially the awareness for environmental damage is not only caused by that but also by a shift of attitudes and core values amongs big enterprises. Thinking about that, we realized that Sustainability is a topic that we only implicitly touched in the data of our report, but that plays a great and even growing role in today’s Supply Chains. We adjusted our data respectively and established Sustainability as a separate segment. To get a better overview here, we are happy about every startup in the sustainability segment that registers at scm-startups.com and enriches our data set – be it Carbon Accounting, Offsetting/Carbon Removal or Circular Economy Topics like re-commerce. A separate report with focus on Sustainability only is already in the making.
