Sustainable supply chains

Among these disruptive events were a five-day winter and ice storm that had widespread impact across the United States, northern Mexico, and parts of Canada in February 2021. The six-day obstruction of the Suez Canal in March 2021 also caused major disruptions to logistics services worldwide. Ramifications included limited port operations, drops in schedule reliability, and cargo displacement, which in turn impacted inventory levels, customer fulfillment, and cost performance across the supply chain.

In a recovering logistics landscape facing a number of new challenges in 2021, we sustained optimal service levels and successfully delivered more than 18,000 stock keeping units, adding up to 33 million tons of products to nearly 12,000 customers in over 130 countries, working in close collaboration with over 500 logistics service providers worldwide.

SAFETY AND QUALITY ASSESSMENT SYSTEM

SABIC has been collaborating with other industry stakeholders to develop robust criteria for sustainability assessment in Safety and Quality Assessment (SQAS) to measure the EHSS performance of logistics service providers and to address areas for further improvement.

The drop in our performance in 2021 was caused by the requirement that carriers have a valid report on the SQAS scheme’s database. Due to assessor unavailability and travel bans, a number of assessments had to be postponed or were conducted partially as remote assessments awaiting on-site verification in Q1 2022.

SUPPLIER LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT

We use our Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM) Program to vet new supplier qualifications and verify ongoing compliance. Suppliers must meet our standards to be included in our global database for procurement and supply chain needs. In 2021, we registered 1,485 suppliers through SLM, bringing the total to 30,912. We identified 561 suppliers that were inactive, underperforming, or had failed to comply with our Supplier Code of Conduct, and we removed those suppliers from the database.