Procurement and supply chain management (SCM) play a central role in embedding sustainability within companies and their supply chains. As multipliers, they can influence the value creation processes of companies’ own operations as well as those of numerous suppliers, thus making a significant contribution to the environment and society.
Due to its many years of expertise in the area of sustainability and climate management, sustainable knows the decisive starting points for identifying and strategically expanding sustainability potentials beyond the company’s own business area together with your suppliers and business partners.
We support you in:
A sustainable procurement strategy establishes the guiding principles for responsible purchasing and operationalizes the company-wide sustainability strategy for the procurement function. If your company has already carried out a materiality analysis, we will initially be guided by the results of this analysis, which often also shapes the overarching sustainability strategy. When developing the sustainable procurement strategy, we also consider the company specific demand characteristica and associated sustainability potentials, which include opportunities and risks.
sustainable supports you in developing a mission statement for sustainable procurement tailored to your company. In this process, we identify essential fields of action, core topics and strategic goals and concretize these through key figures, measures and a roadmap for implementation. On this basis, purchasing can make a significant contribution in terms of the fulfillment of your company’s sustainability goals.
The increasing international interconnection of business and the complex global procurement and sales markets can lead to inadequate enforcement of internationally recognized human rights and environmental protection. This is where the German Act on Corporate Due Diligence Obligations in Supply Chains (LkSG) and the EU Draft On Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence step in. Both legislations oblige companies to increase transparency within their value chains, to identify potential risks and to proactively manage them.
sustainable supports you in implementing the requirements of the LkSG. Together with you, we develop a risk analysis concept for your supply chain as well as for your own business operations, considering sustainability risks relevant from a regulatory and corporate strategy perspective. In our risk analysis, we consider both country-specific and category-specific risks and evaluate them according to the severity of the impact, the probability of occurrence and the extent to which your company can influence them. sustainable supports you in deriving and implementing overarching prevention and risk-specific mitigation measures, establishing suitable governance structures for a sustainable risk management, as well as ensuring the corresponding documentation and reporting.
This provides you as a company with transparency on human rights and other social and environmental risks in your supply chain and enables you to fulfill your due diligence obligations based on a developed action plan.
Working closely together with suppliers is indispensable for designing sustainable value chains. Corporate greenhouse gas inventories, like corporate carbon footprints, show that a significant proportion of emissions occur in the upstream and downstream supply chain (Scope 3). Thus, improvement potentials can only be realized in concerted action with suppliers. Systematically embedding sustainability in supplier management processes plays a key role in this regard.
sustainable supports you in integrating sustainability aspects along your supplier management processes. This includes supplier selection, supplier evaluation and development, supplier risk management (also within the framework of the LkSG), supplier audits and supplier trainings.
To make these processes as efficient as possible, we also support you in the selection of suitable system solutions (SSCM platforms) that can be used stand-alone or integrated into your SRM or ERP system. Through this systematic and system-supported embedding of sustainability in your supplier management processes, potentials can be identified in a structured manner and realized together with the suppliers.
Strategic product category management can be used to realize cost, innovation, quality, and sustainability potentials. In this way, strategic categories can be analyzed with regard to ecological, social and ethical opportunities and risks, and optimization levers can be identified.
sustainable supports your procurement department in identifying critical categories with regard to key sustainability issues such as climate protection, circular economy and human rights. These can be derived on the basis of the sustainability strategy or sustainable procurement strategy, risk and hotspot analysis, and GHG balances or life cycle analyses.
Together with your buyers or category managers, sustainable identifies criteria and levers to systematically anchor sustainability aspects in category strategies. Sustainability thus takes on strategic importance in the selection and development of suppliers in the design of products and services (e.g., via specifications), and in award decisions (e.g., via tenders).