Transparent Processes: The First Step Towards a Sustainable Future.

Transparency as a term has gained increasing traction, and as Forbes identifies, could be the biggest opportunity for businesses in 2021. In the context of growing regulatory pressure on businesses, every industry is being encouraged to invoke the term ‘transparent’ to describe their ways of doing business, and their internal or external ways of communication. 

Why is this, and what is the actual benefit of being transparent? 

Much like any word that is overused for the benefit of business, ‘transparent’ has become a buzz word, which much like other buzz words, loses its meaning when it is used without context. Therefore, the ability for so many aspects of business to aspire to be described as ‘transparent' makes exploring and contextualising the benefit of making different ways of working transparent a worthwhile exercise. 

Darren Perucci points out how transparency in management and leadership provides benefits for the business as whole by benefiting employee performance. All things Supply Chain, also makes the compelling point that consumers are increasingly looking for brands they can trust, and a transparent supply chain facilitates this by making brands accountable for their sourcing decisions, satisfying consumer demand for brand transparency. This is not a new concept, and in 2016 The Entrepreneur highlighted some key companies who have benefited from committing to transparent supply chains, to name just two; Whole foods and Patagonia. These companies, amongst others, have been able to delight shareholders, consumers and employees alike. An illustration of this is that Patagonia’s employee turnover as of Feb 2020 was less than 4%. Harvard Business Review has also documented the benefit to companies in terms of identifying unnecessary middlemen, and in increasing their customer value, both inevitably benefitting the bottom line. 

In no order of priority, here are some of the reasons why we at DeepStream believe that transparent processes are the way forward in every sense, and how our auditable and transparent platform can help you achieve that. 

Simply, transparent ways of working enables you to make better, smarter and more efficient decisions. 

Transparency in your internal communication means that everyone can feed in their ideas to help your team come up with the best solution to a problem. It also means that responsibility for workflows can be shared and assigned with ease if everyone is aware of what is happening. Similarly, transparency in external communication enables your team to provide a well coordinated and organised service to your client. It ensures that wires aren’t crossed in client responses, and that your team members can support you in responding to information or action-based requests. At DeepStream, we are enabling our users  to do this by streamlining their communication and consolidating them on our platform. They will be able to add team members to the RFx they create, and choose their level of access to the information provided by themselves or the supplier. This can be done by setting granular permissions against all information uploaded onto the platform; remaining transparent in what they're doing, whilst protecting sensitive information. This means transparency across their internal team and with suppliers. 

Sustainability is another crucial beneficiary of transparency. Transparent workflows in the tendering and supply chain process give you the opportunity to make smarter decisions and make sustainability a priority in your evaluation process. Whether this is by inviting an objective third party to oversee evaluations, or your team taking the initiative to include sustainability in their own evaluation, DeepStream enables you to do both. Our Evaluation module enables buyers to see their suppliers in a clear side by side comparison against the scoring and criteria that the buyer and their team have inputted. This gives the buyer the option to enter sustainability as a criteria by which to evaluate your suppliers. We also have a key feature which makes us uniquely qualified to promote transparent decisions and therefore sustainability - our Collaboration feature. This feature enables our partners to invite a collaborator (Advisor, Consultant, Broker) to join a request and view and help consider evaluations, helping our partners make the decision that is the best economically and environmentally.

To go one step further, our Audit trail records all events in real-time on a RFx once it has been sent to suppliers. This means that at any point during the RFx process our partners can download a trail of all the communication with any one or all suppliers, communication within their own team, changes in information suppliers have provided, or updates they  have made to the request since it’s been sent. Never having to trawl through their emails again trying to find one particular email exchange, and feeling secure in being able to demonstrate the transparency of their workflows. 

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SO, there it is - transparency makes life easier, helps you make better decisions and promotes sustainability, to name just a few benefits. DeepStream enables partners to embed transparency by default throughout the commercial lifecycle from planning through to procurement, contract award, performance and completion.

Fancy taking your first step towards achieving all the above?

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