Proxima worked with this market-leading Fortune 500 company to create a sustainable procurement strategy. The business placed the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDGs) at the heart of its vision, with the aim of pioneering a green and socially equitable recovery from the pandemic. To achieve this goal, seven of the UNSDGs were used to underpin a series of sustainability initiatives and targets at a corporate level.
With the majority of outgoing revenue being spent on third-party suppliers, the organization recognized that supplier contributions would be critical to both achieving targets and managing underlying risks. Proxima worked with the commercial leadership team to create a sustainable procurement vision, strategy, and action plan.
We held initial working sessions with the leadership team to align on the organization’s macro vision and goals. With third-party examples from inside and outside of the sector, and content and thinking from Proxima’s strategy and product suite, we laid the foundations for the delivery of the project and mapped out a vision, purpose, and values that represented both the organization and the corporate team. With the leadership group aligned, we created a program around three pillars:
- We constructed a narrative to outline how and why sustainable sourcing would help the organization achieve its business and sustainability goals. This focussed on the role of sourcing and suppliers on business revenue, brand reputation, risk management, and cost control. This narrative would be used internally to solidify the link between business goals, supply market asks, and corporate behaviors.
- We ran a deep dive on how the organization could better embed goals and targets into sourcing strategy, policy, processes, and reporting. This focussed on deconstructing the four business pillars environmental, social, community and governance, and setting out a draft of the supplier vision, standards, and targets, within a 2030 timeframe. These would be refined through collaboration with the supply market, fusing what is desirable with what is possible.
- Finally, we set out an implementation plan for how the sourcing team would adopt and embed the strategy through accelerated projects, risk management initiatives, and embedded transformation activities.
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