Conquering Sustainability in the Supply Chain

Dr. Kerstin Höfle remembers energy efficiency being a prominent topic when she entered the logistics industry in 2014. Interest did not necessarily mean customers were ready to pay for it. By this 2022 Innovation Rockstars conversation, rising energy prices and wider concern about sustainability had made the discussion much more immediate.

For the Vice President of R&D and Product Management at Körber Supply Chain, that change raised a practical challenge: how do you turn a broad ambition into useful products and improvements across a connected system?

Her answer starts close to operations. Understand the customer problem, find the technology that can help and involve the people needed to make it work. Höfle is interested in new capabilities, but she is equally concerned with the relationships and everyday communication that allow an organization to put them to use.

Look beyond the energy used by one product

Höfle argues that sustainability work needs to consider the whole supply chain. Energy consumed in manufacturing matters, as does the energy used when equipment operates at a customer's site. Neither view alone explains the wider impact.

In the interview, she describes the challenge of measuring and aggregating emissions across the supply chain without double counting. Her concern is whether the work helps show an actual improvement, rather than simply generating another report.

The same wider perspective shapes her view of the last mile. She describes the familiar experience of several parcel providers ringing the same doorbell, alongside congestion in city centers. Individual solutions may be promising, but fragmented initiatives do not automatically add up to a coordinated delivery system.

Her comparison comes from a visit to Hamburg, where she encountered an app bringing different forms of passenger transport together. What interested her was the presence of someone coordinating the experience. She sees a similar coordination challenge in parcel delivery, while making clear that this is an opportunity to explore, rather than a solution her team has already delivered.

Start scouting with a problem worth solving

Höfle describes an earlier scouting approach focused on particular technologies or industries. In practice, she found it disconnected from the problems the organization needed to solve.

The alternative she outlines starts with a challenge. Teams working on that challenge then look for technologies and potential partners that could help. Scouting becomes part of the work of solving a problem, with a clearer reason to assess a particular capability.

That approach depends on staying close to customers. Sales colleagues are an important source, but so are people across the company who notice something useful. Research, trend reports and industry conversations contribute context; they do not replace understanding the customer's actual need.

For R&D teams, the distinction is consequential. A promising technology can justify further exploration, but someone still has to explain what problem it could address and why that problem matters. A collection of interesting developments is not yet a product direction.

Keep the route into the organization simple

Höfle is candid that the innovation process she describes is not perfectly structured. She places considerable value on colleagues knowing whom to contact and feeling able to share what they have found.

“you can have super structured processes, but at the end of the day, it's about person-to-person communication.”

Her invitation to colleagues is deliberately practical: call when you find something relevant. She is not suggesting that a large company can dispense with prioritization or development processes. Ideas still have to reconnect with an organization responsible for delivering mature, safe and reliable products.

Her concern is making the early exchange unnecessarily difficult. If every observation requires a formal submission and a long wait, the process can get in the way of the conversation it is supposed to support.

She even catches herself assuming that corporate work must be highly formal, then questions where that assumption came from. Structure has a purpose, but it should not become a reason to make useful contact harder.

Use partnerships where the capability is elsewhere

The pace and variety of technology development make it unrealistic to build everything internally, in Höfle's view. Her department had begun looking for promising ideas and partners as part of its product and innovation work.

This follows the same problem-first logic as scouting. Once a team understands the challenge, it can look for the capability that fits, including outside the company. The need for collaboration becomes especially clear when the problem spans several parts of a supply chain.

She is also measured about automation. Despite working in an automation business, she does not expect warehouses to become completely independent of people. Her analogy is a mathematical limit: progress can move closer and closer without necessarily reaching an absolute endpoint.

That remains her perspective in the interview, rather than a certainty about every future warehouse. It keeps the discussion centered on useful applications and operational needs instead of an all-or-nothing vision of automation.

Get close enough to see how the business works

Höfle's advice to someone entering the industry is direct:

“Get close to operations.”

A strategy role can be interesting while still leaving someone distant from how the business earns money and serves customers. She encourages people to learn that operational reality before deciding where to take their careers.

The advice also helps explain her proudest innovation moment. She recalls recognizing that her team could bring something to market through a hands-on approach, despite the absence of a fully defined process. She does not name the product or offer a performance figure; the achievement she emphasizes is the team's ability to make progress together.

For leaders, that leaves a useful test of their own innovation arrangements. Can someone with a real customer problem reach the right people, find relevant expertise and move the work forward? The quality of that path matters as much as the sophistication of the process diagram.