Supporting Adler & Allan’s focus to reduce their environmental footprint across their supply chain 

Customer: Adler & Allan 

Sector: Private

Overview

Adler & Allan help public and private sector businesses understand and manage their environmental risks, reducing the impact to the environment, their operation and their reputation. Trading since 1926, they have grown to become Britain’s leading supplier of spill response, technical, fuel and environmental risk reduction services. 

Challenge

As regulations change and additional opportunities arise to ensure the environment is kept safe, businesses like Adler & Allan are looking for ways to reduce inefficiencies and further enhance their supply-chain processes. Adler & Allan looked for a technology solution to digitise their supplier onboarding process with ongoing supplier management. The goal was to reduce risk and meet compliance requirements, including the ability to adhere to ISO 14001, and to follow best practices in order to reduce their environmental footprint amongst their supply chain. 

Adler & Allan previously managed their supplier onboarding and management via phone calls, emails and spreadsheets. As the business grew, and the supplier numbers increased, it was becoming a challenge to manage the information and be proactive. For example, having to manually track where suppliers were in the onboarding process, which suppliers were fully onboarded, and whether supplier insurances were still valid. On top of this, the ability to report as a team was a time consuming process and some information could not be reported. 

Shaun Milner, Head of Procurement, Adler & Allan said: “During an audit, often you are asked where certain information is, or what process was followed to source a supplier and capture their information. The visibility was not always there and we were reliant as a business to ask individuals who worked on that specific task to clarify.” 

Solution 

Adler & Allan adopted Market Dojo’s supplier onboarding solution, SIM Dojo, to overcome their challenge. The solution was set up and ready to use within a few weeks, with Market Dojo supporting the specific category questionnaire builds. 

From an auditing perspective, Shaun Milner said: “The system gave us the ability to report and search for information that was being asked during an audit. We could easily show in an instant how many suppliers we had onboarded and what score the supplier had been awarded following the submission of their information. With the supplier questionnaires, all of the information was available within the system, in real-time, and it was therefore no longer an area questioned during the audit”. 

In terms of ISO 14001, SIM Dojo was supporting Adler & Allan to operate with the best practices they were looking to instill and their compliance requirements were being met. 

Shaun Milner said: “The fact that we can carry out updates and further customise SIM Dojo to integrate with our systems or to accommodate a change in our internal processes made it more appealing. When compared to a large ERP system, often the initial monetary investment means you have to work with what you have bought, there is no ability to tweak”. 

Results

SIM Dojo provides Adler & Allan with visibility of the overall status of its supply chain with dashboards to monitor. Centralised data provides an at a glance view of how many suppliers are onboarded, where they are within a process and what information is outstanding. With automated reminders, suppliers are prompted to provide updated documentation such as insurance certificates if they are nearing their expiry date. 

Shaun Milner, Head of Procurement, Adler & Allan said: “We no longer have to update spreadsheets, all of the supplier information is stored in one place, and it’s consistent information as the suppliers follow a set questionnaire and it’s allowing us to follow best practices. The information in the system is also real-time, so what you see is up to date and allows us real-time management and monitoring of our suppliers. The risk of duplicate requests for data has also been removed”.

Adler & Allan has estimated that they have cut their onboarding processes by 40% by digitising their processes. Their supplier compliance levels have increased and therefore risks reduced. 

As Adler & Allan continue to grow, and with SIM Dojo in place, they are looking to grow the process from being clerical to more strategic, where they can rationalise the supplier base and provide more reporting data to the business to support decision making. There is also the possibility of reviewing the supply chain and ensuring no overlap in suppliers and that they are achieving the best procurement results from supplier leverage.