Case Study
Empowering Your Team to Implement a Sustainable Procurement Strategy
Background to the partnership
This case study focuses on one of our global clients; a leading international banking and financial services organisation with employees in offices across many locations.
Financial institutions are under increasing pressure from investors, consumers, employees and regulators to lead the way when it comes to sustainability. Our client has chosen to focus, not only on ensuring their products have the right ESG weighting, but also ensuring every department meets stringent ESG targets.
This programme focused on working with their Procurement teams as they transition to sustainability as standard practice. We designed it to enhance participants’ ability to:
- Engage with suppliers to drive and implement the bank’s sustainability agenda
- Make sustainability-driven decisions
- Make meaningful, long-term change to global procurement strategy
We brought in our leading experts in sustainable investment, country risk advice and geopolitical risk advice to create an innovative programme, using up-to-the-minute content. Our goal was to design a blended solution that, on completion, would enable participants to answer 3 questions:
- What is a successful sustainable strategy?
- What constitutes good practice when focusing on sustainable procurement?
- How should the procurement team engage with suppliers to understand where they are in their sustainability journey and determine appropriate future performance metrics?
Focusing on social and collaborative learning, Procurement team members took part in 3 open forum discussions via Zoom. These focused conversations allowed participants to enhance their skillset and find new ways to bring suppliers with them on the sustainable journey.
Prior to attending the 3 open forum discussions, participants completed relevant online content hosted on the bank’s corporate academy.
Winning Hearts and Minds
The Benefits of ESG and the case for sustainable procurement:
- Recap of ESG principles
- Identify the benefits of sustainable procurement to the Bank, suppliers and procurement team
The consequences for leading brands who got the ESG agenda wrong:
- Identify others’ mistakes as a framework to explore ways of enhancing the Bank’s approach and getting it right first time
Strategies for accelerating the achievement of sustainability targets:
- Group exercise to identify significant sustainable areas in the bank’s procurement chain and their impact
- Discussion to agree how the team can be seen as leaders of driving the sustainability agenda
Innovation:
- Group exercise to map the existing supply chain and develop a framework to identify priority order of suppliers with whom to engage
Pragmatic Sustainable Procurement
Practical application:
- Group exercise to identify which sustainability areas are most important now and how this may change going forward
Baseline supplier performance:
- Group exercise to devise potential frameworks and sustainability criteria, against which to score suppliers when reviewing RFP responses.
- In plenary, review the scoring matrix to determine what “good” looks like.
Assessing suppliers’ sustainability credentials:
- Exploring the benefits of, and how best to use, platforms that measure the sustainability performance of organisations and their suppliers
Sustainability as Standard Procurement Practice
Putting it into practice:
Using the agreed frameworks from session two, participants had the opportunity to:
- Apply sustainability principles to carefully curated business scenarios that reflect their real life situations
- Discuss required organisational changes to enhance their ability to incorporate ESG criteria into their procurement decisions
- Agree approaches to inform colleagues who rely on their guidance of the need to consider ESG criteria when making procurement decisions
If you have any questions about this case study, or interested in our Customised Programmes, please get in touch.
