Sustainability cannot be tackled by procurement teams alone and collaboration – both internally and externally – is key to integrating ESG issues into an organisation, an event was told.
Procurement leaders must work closely with CEOs and embed themselves at the heart of the business to successfully tackle sustainability issues, Malcolm Harrison, group CEO, CIPS, told the CIPS Sustainable Procurement Summit.
Harrison said: “Particularly at a time when procurement teams are having to focus on resilience, financial targets and sustainability, the most important thing is making sure the leader of your procurement team is really well engaged internally in the business, because the sustainability agenda can’t be owned by procurement. It can be delivered by procurement, but it has to be owned by the organisation. It has to be interwoven into the fabric and values of the organisation.
“Those conversations between the head of your procurement function and CEO are incredibly important because if you try and do this on your own without the alignment from the rest of the business, guess what? It’s going to be a lot more difficult.”
Collaboration is not only important internally, but externally with others in the industry, he said.
“There’s a very important role the community has to play in terms of learning from each other. Saving the planet is not a competitive issue,” he said.
“Therefore seeing what other organisations are doing, stealing their best practices, working out where you can apply those and working with the community is the best way to do that.”
Having open communication across the industry will allow procurement teams to more readily reach their ESG goals, from sustainability to tackling modern slavery.
Harrison continued: “One of the great things about the profession is that most people in procurement know when something is competitive. These are non-competitive topics. There is no harm in sharing, no harm in collaborating. That has always been the case.
“But now, rather than thinking, ‘There’s no harm in sharing’, we need to say, ‘We need to share, we need to collaborate’. Most organisations will have addressed an issue at some stage that another organisation hasn’t addressed. So go out, talk to your competitors first, talk to the community, and talk to people you know across the industry and ask how you can go about it.”
Summarising the importance of procurement teams in helping push sustainability, Harrison said: “The world’s focus on sustainability and these massive disruptions in supply chains all together happening at the same time has absolutely reaffirmed the importance of procurement and supply.”
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