The team started by mapping out the relevant directives for Neat, taking into account existing processes and the company's roadmap for production, value chains and market presence.

As a young scale-up focusing on expanding and keeping up with demand, Neat was struggling to keep up with the ever changing sustainability directive landscape. Moreover, they needed to put in place an overarching sustainability strategy and roadmap. While Neat has been working with sustainability, having reduced their packaging, increased their repairability, the scope and scale of the incoming directives meant that Neat was falling behind.

Staying compliant is crucial for their ability to maintain their ticket-to-trade in the short-term. In the long term, a company like Neat has the potential to take advantage of the new market spaces being created by directives such as the right-to-repair.



Navigating the new directive landscape 

The team mapped the legislative landscape and its implications, challenges and opportunities that they represent for Neat. This resulted in two main deliveries:


Sopra Steria Footprint’s expertise in sustainability advisory ensured that we identified all relevant directives, mapping them to complexity and urgency according to Neat’s current value chains, growth ambitions, procurement processes and so forth.




With an overview of the incoming directives, the team created a strategic roadmap for how to tackle this in a viable and opportunistic way. They introduced three pillars that the company need to build incrementally over three stages, with the first steps focused on securing short-term sales through compliancy, and later steps about shifting their product cycles and business models to leverage the clear opportunities being created. If followed, Neat will be able to transition their company in an efficient and smart way.


3. Organisational grounding and understanding


As part of this process, the team interviewed and facilitated workshops with stakeholders from across Neat’s core business processes. This was crucial for the team’s understanding of the company’s status, but more importantly, it ensured that this process was aligned with the main enablers within the organisation, giving Neat the understanding and cohesion needed to make change going forward.

Legislative overview and a tailored roadmap 

We provided Neat with a strategically framed sustainability roadmap, indicating the different phases of activities they should follow. 

Neat entered the project with a lot of unknown unknowns around sustainability and thus uncertainty around what company processes needed to be setup and prioritised. The directive mapping, strategic framework and roadmap were precisely the pieces needed to build the company’s maturity around the subject while simultaneously putting Neat on the right track to tackle the changing landscape in a viable and opportunistic manner.

A strategic roadmap that turns EU directives into business opportunity