The theme for this year's Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) conference was innovate, integrate, and inspire. Underlying those themes, however, were keynotes and sessions highlighting the challenges, needs and opportunities for developing solutions at scale. BSR's mission to "work with business to create a just and sustainable world" was showcased by the diverse group of presenters and attendees.

From Julia Ormand's opening keynote describing slavery around the world (which her mom urged her to "keep it light") to presentations from Walmart, Intel, SABMiller, and Avon, many of the presenters described programs that look outside the borders of their companies to the greater impact they can have across their supply chains. Some of the biggest impacts where scale is critical are energy, water, and women.

Powering Change in China

During a breakout session on energy efficiency and the supply chain Ken Lanshe, Vice President of Global Sourcing for Shenzhen Walmart, described how the company was working with the BSR Energy Efficiency Partnership (EEP) to help their Chinese suppliers achieve 20 percent to 30 percent savings from energy reductions at their factories. For the world's largest retailer, scale means "piloting" a program at 200 factories and growing that number to more than one thousand.

The challenge is mostly financial, as small factories can't afford the initial investments required to procure the equipment and services to make them more energy-efficient. To help jumpstart this process, partnerships have been launched where financial institutions create energy efficiency investment vehicles, essentially third-party debt financing, for these projects and work with ESCOs (energy services companies) to engineer a solution for the factories. This allows the factories to become more efficient without the upfront capital investment.

One of the ways in which Walmart is helping to get the program to scale is by identifying sets of factories with common processes (e.g., metal fabricators or injection molding shops) so that common solutions can be implemented across a large number of sites at once. Mr. Lanshe observed that while no supplier wants to share cost models with their competitors, they are willing to share the experiences with energy efficiency projects and this has helped accelerate the program across Walmart's supply base.

Mr. Lanshe shared several lessons learned, including:

Align your program with a corporate commitment (GreenBiz has written about Walmart's commitment to eliminate 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from its global supply chain by the end of 2015 here)

Mandate your program to strategic suppliers and factories. In addition to mandating the program, Mr. Lanshe also stressed mandating sub-metering at the factories to eliminate any potential for fraud)

Incentivize participation. One way in which Walmart looks to do this is to shift additional production volumes to their top energy efficiency performers as a reward for participating in the program

Perhaps the biggest lesson learned is that "you can't do it alone." Mr. Lanshe stressed that it requires partnering with NGOs, financial institutions, ESCOs, other retailers, and government to make an impact at scale.

A Deeper Dive into Water

Another topic of discussion at the conference was water (and not just the lack of it in the meeting rooms). In several discussions by retailers and at a session featuring Intel and SAB Miller (read Joel Makower's account of that session here), the extended supply chain issues associated with water use were often floated as the most immediate impact of climate change.