Using Your THESIS Results to Drive Value
Congratulations! You have your THESIS results!
Completing your THESIS assessments and sharing the results with your retailer buyers was the first step towards more sustainable and competitive consumer goods. Now that you’ve completed your THESIS assessments, this stage supports maximizing the value from your THESIS process, making improvements year over year, and using your THESIS results to drive value for your organization.
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Key Resources
Use your THESIS results to drive value for your organization with the below three steps:
Step 1
Understand your THESIS Results
- Review your THESIS Assessment Scorecards
- Review other resources available on THESIS
- Cluster your results to identify patterns and understand connections
Step 2
Use your organization’s strategic priorities to identify your key areas of improvement
- Understand key goals and priorities across your business and your important external stakeholders.
- What mechanisms can you use to address different risks and impacts?
- Review your learnings and pain points from your THESIS assessment process
Step 3
Create and implement your Action Plan(s)
- Use the priorities and relevant mechanisms you’ve identified to create action plans
- Identify a recurring schedule to provide updates on progress
- Tie your initiatives to key organizational strategies and goals.
Suppliers are sharing their results!
See how NicePak is promoting their THESIS rankings and sustainability progress to retailers and within their own company
Step 1. Understand your THESIS Results
Review and understand the resources and analytics available on THESIS on SupplyShift. Identifying your strengths and data gaps will help you prioritize and increase the likelihood of improved scores next time you complete your assessments.
Review your THESIS Assessment Scorecards:
Once THESIS assessments are submitted, your Scorecard is available by navigating to the assessment on THESIS on SupplyShift, and selecting the “Scorecard” tab at the top of the screen. Scorecards remain available to you to come back to anytime. You can download the scorecard export for any submitted assessment by navigating to the Scorecard tab of an assessment and selecting “Download scorecard” from the overflow menu.
While viewing your scorecards, consider the following:
- Overall assessment level and KPI-level scores and performance
- Overall assessment and KPI-level peer rankings. These will help you determine if you are leading, lagging, or on-par with your peer suppliers.
- General and KPI-level Action Recommendations based on your KPI answers. These are tailored to your scores.
- Did you have any “Unable to determine” responses?
- Were there relevant assessments you didn’t complete?
- Are there recurring hotspots across products and assessments?
- What KPIs had gaps or incomplete data?
Leverage resources available on THESIS:
- Published Analytics: allows you to visualize your THESIS results with diagrams so you can easily see the areas that need improvement and focus your attention where it counts. Published Analytics are based on all THESIS data so you can gauge your performance against the industry standard.
- Improvement Opportunities: Found within your KPI PDFs and the KPI excel on your assessment cover page, improvement opportunities are practices that improve a product’s environmental and/or social performance relevant to one or more hotspot, additional issue, and/or stakeholder concern.
- KPI Guidance: KPI Guidance for your assessments includes helpful background information and information the most relevant certification, standards, and tools
- Sustainability Snapshots: Found on your assessment cover page, they provide overviews of the issues and opportunities for each product category. These are ideal for internal communication when collecting data, as well as communicating results to external audiences
- Supply Chain Diagrams: Found on your assessment cover page, these are visual representations of product life cycles that highlight locations of hotspots, improvement opportunities, and their associated KPIs
Identify patterns: As you understand your THESIS results, begin to cluster your results so you can identify patterns and plan to efficiently make progress. You can cluster by:
- Broader impact and issues: For example, which KPIs address climate or deforestation goals?
- How they’re related to your sustainability goals
- By supply chain stages: which do you have more control to influence?
- By mechanism you’ll use to address them
Step 2: Use your organization’s strategic priorities to identify your key areas of improvement
Work with your colleagues in different areas across the business to have strategic conversations about their goals and priorities. These can include your public relations, risk management, marketing, sourcing, sales, corporate affairs, and buying teams.
Determine your key priorities and where you’ll focus to maximize your ability to make progress.
THESIS’s holistic, science and stakeholder collaboration-based hotspots create clarity on the most pressing sustainability impacts for your products. Your THESIS results include tailored action recommendations to inform your priority areas and planning for improvements year over year. Overlaying your THESIS results with your organizational, retailer, and stakeholder priorities further supports your success in most efficiently driving results.
Consider:
- Would a certification effectively address the hotspot?
- Identify relevant mechanisms to address different risks and impacts
- Are there existing operational processes you can utilize?
- Review your learnings and pain points from your THESIS assessment process, including your data collection and earlier phases. What can you implement to make the process more efficient and effective?
- What are collective action organizations and initiatives you can participate in to expedite your organization’s progress towards your goals?
- What are the risks of not addressing a hotspot or impact? Examples might include public relations risks or supply chain disruptions.
- Where can you begin to make improvements and progress, even while you search for data and information?
- How work intensive would it be to address a hotspot in comparison to the relative impact?
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What are the sustainability goals and priorities of your retailer buyer(s)?
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What are the sustainability priorities and goals of your company?
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Identify any relevant information from external consumer intelligence sources, like Nielsen.
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Understand the priorities of your important external stakeholders.
Step 3: Create and Implement your Action Plan(s)
Use the priorities and relevant mechanisms you’ve identified to create action plans.
Set ambitious, SMART goals that include year-over-year improvements, with tangible milestones that can be communicated to your retailer buyers, customers, consumers, financial partners, and other stakeholders. Consider sharing your initiatives externally to build stakeholder trust through transparency.
While creating your action plans, include:
- Identification of a recurring schedule to provide updates on progress and create alignment on priorities and decisions with both internal and external stakeholders.
- How can you circle back to your facilities, stakeholders, and suppliers to share key learnings from your THESIS process?
- Ways to integrate other business areas into your action plans and decision making.
- What are ways that you can influence your supply chain partners to make improvements and incentivize action on key priorities?
- How will you communicate these to your retail buyers, customers, and external stakeholders?
Execute your action plans and plan regular progress updates with your key stakeholders.
As you execute your plans, ensure you:
- Monitor progress and engage your stakeholders.
- Identify potential internal champions and external experts that support your initiatives.
- Share regular progress updates with clear success metrics, especially highlighting early successful initiatives to increase engagement.
- Tie your initiatives to key organizational strategies and goals. Ensure you’re emphasizing the importance to creating long term business value.
- Identify and utilize external initiatives that you can join to support progress on your initiatives.
Resources are available to provide hands-on support
TSC Trained Service Providers
Trained Service Providers are experienced sustainability expert consultants, with specialized training in THESIS content, KPIs, and methodology.
TSC Membership
TSC Members receive enhanced THESIS assessment and performance support. Consider joining as a full TSC member to take advantage of all the tools and services TSC has to offer