By: Alexandra Kueller
The Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA) recently announced their brand new Retail Sustainability Management Maturity Matrix. The Matrix, which is based on Deloitte and RILA’s knowledge of the retail industry and its sustainability programs, hopes to be a tool that will be used by sustainability executives, individual companies, and industry-wide.
(Although this matrix is designed with the retail industry in mind, we think that it has a wide applicability beyond just the retail sector.)
While there are many aspects of sustainability, the Matrix focuses specifically on environmental sustainability. The Matrix has seven sectors that helps break down the different components of environmental sustainability:
- Strategy & Commitment
- People & Tools
- Visibility
- Retail Operations
- Supply Chain
- Products
- Environmental Issues
Each sector is then broken down by dimensions, and each dimension is ranked by five categories: starting, standard, excelling, leading, and next practice. RILA acknowledges that only a few companies are in the “leading” category, but hopes that over the next few years more companies can get to that level. The main goal of the Matrix is to identify all of the possible pathways to strong environmental sustainability.
Here are some of the ways the Matrix can be useful:
- Identifying and assessing the maturity of your sustainability program and opportunities for improvement
- Helping to facilitate conversations about your sustainability program’s development
- Finding ways to access for funding for your sustainability program
- Training employees to have more sustainability responsibility
- Allowing internal, external evaluation of your program’s perception, gaps it might have
It’s RILA’s goal to use the Matrix to benchmark the industry in 2015, while annually updating the matrix.
Over the course of the next two weeks, we will be further breaking down the Matrix by sector to get a more in-depth look at how the Matrix will work.
Last fall we took an in-depth look at SSC's peer benchmarking system that we used against the athletic wear industry. Catch up here.