Sustainability & CSR

Overview of Supplier Sustainability & CSR

Implementing a Supplier Sustainability or Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) program for your entire supply chain can be a daunting task and presents difficulties during deployment as the responsibility typically falls to procurement departments who have traditionally focused primarily on cost and quality. This value driver is also often overlooked and seen as a low priority activity. However corporate board rooms, external stakeholders and investors see the value added by such initiatives and programs and investment in CSR has trebled over the past 5 years.

The supplier CSR program will be different for each organization, depending on their industry and level of maturity in CSR. Systems need to be flexible in order to meet the individual program requirements and alleviate all transactional efforts from the procurement organization. ESM's Sustainability & CSR module delivers comprehensive functionality to manage any type of CSR initiative effortlessly whilst still having a broad scope of the supply chain, which is important as CSR is not about business continuity but about Corporate Citizenship which does not discriminate on size of the supplier or contract. If you work with a supplier in a specific market your corporation has to assume certain responsibilities.

How does it work?

• Define: create CSR initiatives (e.g. Health & Safety, Sustainable Procurement, Green Purchasing) and define the relevant parts of the process, scope and organizational responsibility. For example you can have different initiatives defined depending on the geography or commodity of the supplier, allowing you to tailor needs as needed.
• Engage: send out request to internal stakeholders and/or suppliers to collect the required information, either as a one off, or on an ongoing basis.
• Review & Follow-Up: upon reviewing the information you can define follow-up actions such as, additional questionnaires, audits, etc... ESM Supplier Portal can be further leveraged here to allow external audit partners to collaborate together with the supplier, to coordinate audits, enhance tracking and reporting, and fully automate the process across all parties, the supplier, your company and the auditing company.
• Score & Assess: provide a scoring and assessment for the supplier, in relation to each initiative. This can be manual or fully automated depending on how the process has been setup. The system is flexible to suit all different types of process combination's.
• Analyze & Manage: each initiative has it's own standard dashboard defined, allowing you to track status information and scores at a local or aggregate levels with a variety of different dimensions, such as geography, business lines and commodity.