A single index makes it possible to compare suppliers and steer procurement, negotiation and improvement plans.
Where this project comes from
This project starts from a very specific need: to bring order. Villart Logistic is a solid company with deep business knowledge spread across many teams, but with supplier evaluation criteria that lived side by side in fragmented form, applied inconsistently and hard to trace.
Sustainability initially came in as a new criterion to add to external supplier procurement. The question was simple: how do you prioritise suppliers by bringing in environmental parameters without losing sight of quality, safety and service? What started as a sustainability-indicator system ended up revealing something deeper: the chance — and the need — to unify every evaluation criterion into a single integrated system. A new environmental criterion ended up driving a single system for evaluating the whole supplier relationship.
What it changes, and why it matters
The project changes how the company relates to its value chain. It doesn’t add another layer of requirements — it connects dimensions that already existed: safety, quality and sustainability. The result is a single index that lets suppliers be assessed in a way that’s comparable, consistent and able to evolve.
One of the more significant shifts is moving from evaluating a supplier on paper to also assessing the real impact of the services provided. Automated per-service carbon footprint calculation — in gCO₂e/t·km — turns sustainability into an operational, quantifiable variable, one that plugs directly into the organisation’s overall carbon footprint and is particularly key for tackling Scope 3 with rigour. Calculating per-service emissions turns Scope 3 into an operational, comparable variable.
How we do it
At Spora, the project was designed as a modular, scalable system. First, we aligned the existing internal models — safety, quality and documentary sustainability — into a single, easy-to-read identifier. Then we brought in a detailed methodology for calculating the carbon footprint of each external service, factoring in vehicle type, fuel, load carried, distance travelled and empty return trips.
Aggregating this data produces environmental indicators that are comparable by supplier and by year, bringing quantitative and qualitative results together into one index. The system doesn’t just organise information — it enables more coherent decisions on procurement, negotiation and planning improvements with the external fleet.
The project also sets out a clear technology roadmap for integrating this index into the company’s internal information systems.
Limits, lessons, and the future it sets in motion
The project’s main limitation is also its main lesson: the system is designed, validated and methodologically sound, but full integration into internal systems isn’t possible yet. Today, the index exists as an operational and strategic model; tomorrow, it will need to become a fully integrated, automated tool.
This project shows the knowledge was already inside the company — just scattered. Standardising it, digitising it and integrating it isn’t only a technical question, it’s a cultural one. The future it sets in motion is clear: supplier management where sustainability, quality and service stop competing with each other and become part of a single decision-making system. And, with that, the real possibility of precisely measuring and reducing the Scope 3 climate impact — one of the logistics sector’s biggest challenges. Standardising scattered knowledge is the first step towards automating more consistent decisions.