suppliers calculate their footprint, even if they don’t have a dedicated sustainability team. This turns a request for data into a collaborative partnership which you can both build on.
• Traceability and Digital Passports: For high-spec engineering, the ‘Digital Product Passport’ is becoming a reality. This allows a manufacturer to track a component’s journey from the mine to the factory floor, ensuring ethics and carbon claims are backed by a provable digital trail.
Sustainability isn’t just about regulation, however. While regulation is a powerful ‘stick’, there is a very large carrot for those who get this right. In the current market, sustainability is a significant competitive advantage. Major OEMs are now actively pruning their
supply chains, removing vendors who cannot provide transparent ESG data. Conversely, manufacturers who can demonstrate lower carbon intensity in their products are winning more tenders and building deeper trust with their customers. Operationally, the drive for sustainability
often mirrors the drive for lean manufacturing. Reducing carbon usually means reducing waste, optimising logistics, and improving energy efficiency – all of which lead to long- term cost savings.
To help businesses navigate these incoming
rules and regulations, here’s a helpful checklist for manufacturing leaders: • Map Materiality: Identify the most carbon- intensive parts of your supply chain. Is it your raw steel, your chemical treatments or your international shipping?
• Audit Your Data Trails: Can you produce an audit-ready trail of your supplier data’s origin? Manual spreadsheets are no longer enough!
• Benchmark Against Frameworks: Ensure your reporting aligns with the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol and industry-specific standards.
• Integrate Social Value: Sustainability isn’t just about carbon. Modern tenders, especially in the UK public sector, now require evidence of Social Value, covering everything from labour practices to community engagement.
• Review Procurement Contracts: Are sustainability KPIs written into your legal agreements? If not, you lack the leverage to demand the data you need.
As you might have guessed, the scale of this challenge is too vast for manual intervention. If you have 500 suppliers and send each an email asking for their carbon footprint, you will receive 500 different answers in 500 different formats – most of which will be variations of “We don’t know”. This is where technology comes to the rescue. At Axiom, we developed our software to move beyond complex spreadsheets and guesswork. Digital platforms allow manufacturers to: • Automate Data Collection: Instead of continual chasing, supplier portals enable vendors to submit data directly to a centralised hub that standardises emissions factors.
• Achieve Real-Time Visibility: The software provides a live dashboard of your carbon performance, allowing you to identify hotspots in real time.
• Bridge the SME Gap: Use tools with built-in carbon calculators to help your smaller
Daniel Usifoh 37
For manufacturing and design engineers, the journey starts with the realisation that the components you design and the materials you specify carry a carbon legacy. By embracing digital tools to get control and complete visibility over that legacy, businesses can turn Scope 3 from a daunting regulatory burden into a genuinely useful tool for innovation and growth.
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