Sustainable juice ingredients: Eckes-Granini creates more transparency in their supply chain with Azure and Power BI

The challenge: An opaque network of numerous suppliers

Sustainable procurement—in addition to complying with minimum social standards it contains the sustainable cultivation of ingredients along the entire supply chain. Growers have to farm according to the principles of sustainable agriculture and hold at least SAI Platform’s FSA Bronze certification or similar. All along the supply chain, every processing step must conform to the minimum social standards, backed up by a valid SMETA 4-pillar audit certificate. This is a subject very close to the heart of Bernd Neufert, Eckes-Granini’s Procurement Manager with responsibility for supplier and raw material documentation and Group Key Area Lead Sustainable Sourcing: “Protecting our brand, keeping costs under control, and selling more sustainable juice—these are three things we can achieve when we make sustainability a priority.” Eckes-Granini set itself clear goals back in 2019, as Thomas Graf, Director Corporate Communications, explains: “We joined the Sustainable Juice Covenant. This commits us to ensure that by 2030, we offer only products whose raw juice ingredients are procured from 100 percent sustainable sources.” To reach this goal, Eckes-Granini’s Procurement team is working closely with their colleagues in Research & Development and in Quality Assessment. They are looking to familiarize themselves with the relevant supply chains and players—and not least the various fruit and vegetable plantations—and precisely how they work. “We need a clear picture of which suppliers fulfill our sustainability standards,” Neufert says. “We want to know the risks associated with our supply chains and avoid any risk to people or the environment.” There are also legal obligations: on January 1, 2023, Germany’s Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (LkSG) came into force. This law already applies to companies with 3,000 or more employees in Germany and from January 2024 onward will also apply to companies with 1,000 or more employees. It compels companies to ensure that all players in their supply chains uphold the relevant human rights and environmental standards. Long before the Act became law, Eckes-Granini knew that it needed a great deal more transparency in its supply chain. 

That was easier said than done, however, because as Europe’s biggest producer of brand-name fruit juices, Eckes-Granini works with a wide range of different suppliers. The company’s supply chain encompasses agricultural production, grower communities and associations, processing, and ultimately Eckes-Granini’s own filling operations. In the past, keeping track of the entire supply chain was a very complex and time-consuming affair. “We often could see only as far as our direct, first-tier suppliers,” Neufert says. “But it wasn’t always easy to tell where these companies had sourced the raw ingredients—in other words, which second- and third-tier suppliers were in the mix—and how, where, and under what conditions these ingredients were being cultivated and processed. The data was either missing or saved in a variety of lists and formats.” This not only made it harder to monitor suppliers with regard to sustainability, it also masked, say, the risks associated with security of supply that is important to Eckes-Granini in times of crisis. “In procurement, there’s nothing worse than surprises. We have to maximize our ability to predict weaknesses in supply chains and the supply shortages these might cause so that we can prevent them from happening in the first place,” Neufert says. To this end, he and his colleague Anastasiia Strukova, Expert Sustainable Sourcing at Eckes-Granini, teamed up with GDS Business Intelligence GmbH, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network, to develop a solution based on Microsoft Azure and Power BI. This solution enables simple, objective data-driven supplier management, which ultimately paves the way for Eckes-Granini to achieve its own sustainability goals.

The solution: Clean data structure and visualization in Power BI create transparency

After taking a closer look at its supplier data and applying the insights gleaned, almost 70 percent of the ingredients that go into Eckes-Granini’s juices now come from sustainable sources. The company relies on the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform and used Azure SQL to furnish it with a data warehouse that connects to all essential data sources. Internal data sources supply commercial data on, say, sales and business relationships, as well as information about the quality of raw ingredients. External sources—such as Sedex or EcoVadis, provide data on ESG performance, supplemented by public data on countries of origin and the associated risk assessments. Instead of visualizing all this data directly, it is transferred with the help of Azure Data Factory to a new consolidated data model within Azure SQL Database, where it is analyzed and then visualized as a Power BI dashboard. The result is exactly what Neufert hoped it would be: “Suppliers that fall short of our sustainability standards pose a risk within the supply chain to product quality and our brand.” This is why the dashboard visualizes the supply relationships between all players in the supply chain, regardless of whether a supplier belongs to the first, second, or third tier. “This visualization alone makes our solution unique in the market,” Neufert says. “I get a risk assessment for each of our contacts from any tier. If the results of this assessment aren’t what we expected, I can call up more detailed information and find out what the problem is.” This makes the supplier assessment transparent and driven by objective data: if the dashboard shows that one of the suppliers no longer meets the desired standards, Neufert can respond, for instance by paying a visit to the farmer to see for himself what’s going on. In addition, Azure SQL Database allows for the data to be made available not only to Power BI, but also to other analysis tools.

By separating out the links in the supply chain, Eckes-Granini has tripled the number of supplier contacts saved in the system. “The numerous new contacts at second- and third-tier suppliers we’ve gained that way over the past few years are incredibly important for our work,” Neufert says. “We want to have close, long-lasting relationships with our suppliers—especially when we see that they’re willing to join us on our sustainability journey. Through the new contacts, I can ask questions, and explain what’s important to Eckes-Granini and how they as a supplier can meet those expectations. That used to be a lot harder.”

“Everything currently points toward our being able to fulfill our responsibilities under the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act,” Graf says. “This is thanks to our solution based on Microsoft Azure and Power BI—and of course to the thorough documentation and data maintenance performed by our procurement team.” Neufert welcomes the responsibility that stems from the progress made in supply chain transparency: “We’re more than happy to share what we’ve learned from this project with others,” he says. “Many companies are unsure how to move forward and see bringing transparency to their supply chains as a major challenge. We can reassure them. The first thing is always to ensure proper maintenance and consolidation of all the necessary data. Progress might be slow at first, but it soon gathers momentum. You just have to get the ball rolling.” Today, Eckes-Granini is managing to sell more sustainable products, protect its brand, and keep costs under control. The company is also well on its way to achieving its goal of producing juices made from 100 percent sustainably sourced ingredients. And it looks like all the new requirements resulting from the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act will be met in the process.