How to Build your Career with Sustainable Procurement
While designers, developers and engineers might attract the spotlight as product influencers, there’s a key role for procurement professionals in the sustainable supply chain of the future.
Wanted: Supply chain manager. Reports to Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO).
Roles like this are already starting to appear for procurement professionals, in companies as big as Amazon. As the CSO position grows in prominence, so too does their team, often comprising segments from marketing and corporate social responsibility, to health and safety, supply chain and procurement.
What’s more, dozens of leading global companies like Coke, Diageo, Henkel, AB InBev, have created and appointed to the role of ‘Chief Procurement & Sustainability Officer’ within their organisations.
The message is this: procurement professionals are key influencers in organizations of the future, as businesses move towards more transparent and ethical sustainability practices.
How to make strategy part of your procurement purpose
Dr Elouise Epstein is a partner at management consultancy Kearney and author of Trade Wars, Pandemics, and Chaos: How Digital Procurement Enables Business Success in a Disordered World. She sees ESG (environmental, social and governance) as an emerging area that has gained traction in the last three years.
“Those of us who are older have grown up with cost and efficiency as the sole driver. Now it’s cost, efficiency, ESG, and risks all embedded in supply chain strategy.”
And just as procurement has led digital transformation within organizations, Epstein believes supply chain and procurement will also drive sustainability initiatives.
“We think about the design of green products, we fixate on what Tesla is doing. But we as procurement can influence the day-to-day buying within a company, whether it’s the facilities our offices are in, the cleaning products in the facilities, or travel. And I would argue those have at least as much impact as the end designing of the products.”
Tania Seary, founder of Procurious, The Faculty and The Source, has predicted that procurement is a path to a board-level role. It’s becoming clear that the growing focus on sustainability is another route for supply chain careers to lead to the C-suite and beyond.
“ESG is no longer a nice-to-have – employees want it, customers expect it, and investors require it,” Tania says.
“The good news is – Procurement can deliver it. Our recent research with iValua showed that organizations with advanced sustainability programs are over two times more likely to report improved ROI, including sales increases and enhanced service quality. Despite this, sustainable procurement progress is only in its beginning stages for nearly 40% of procurement teams.
“Now is the time to jump on ESG and deliver the full range of benefits for your company and community.”
Future-proof your career with sustainable procurement
Procurement professionals need to understand how important their role in the sustainable supply chain is, says Clare Hobby, Director of Purchaser Engagement at TCO Development, which specializes in the sustainable procurement of IT products.
“It boils down to understanding the power of the purchaser voice, the purchaser budget and the leverage that you have in impacting supply chains. In my space, IT, about 70% of the product footprint throughout its lifetime happens in the supply chain.”
And business leaders are increasingly aware that sustainability is smart business, she adds. Sustainable procurement improves brand reputation, increases sales, and reduces risk.
“Putting sustainability aspects into play in a way that you can verify the outcomes and impact is hugely beneficial for the bottom line, and that interests the C-suite.”
Challenges in sustainable procurement
One of the biggest challenges for procurement professionals driving the sustainable supply chain is that it has become far more complex. Procurement professionals have internal and external standards to uphold and find it difficult to monitor sustainable practices beyond the first tier of production.
“Purchasers of really complex products like computers have to rely on what the manufacturers are telling them. It’s impossible for them to judge, and verification is critically important,” says Hobby.
She suggests using existing tools and frameworks to set criteria, and banding with partners and third-party programs to “help your voice get transmitted into those factory audits and monitoring systems”.
Collectively, procurement professionals can use their leverage to influence product design. “We can aggregate the demand and we can push this singular message towards the industry. We’ve got to move the purchaser’s voice up the value chain.”
Epstein agrees that the sector needs to be more proactive. “Historically, we’ve typically focused on the transaction, three bids and a buy. That’s just a tactical, transactional part of that process.”
“If you walk into a meeting where they’re saying, ‘we want compostable straws’, instead of making the engineers go figure that out, procurement could walk in and say, ‘here are all the suppliers that do compostable products and five of them do straws’.”
Unfortunately, the sustainable procurement sector is not yet mature enough. But it will be, she says. “We don’t have the best data we need. For our job to be successful, as a leader or a new entrant into this market, we need to anticipate: I’m thinking ahead, I’m looking at what Apple is doing, I’m looking at what Tesla is doing. Their [sustainability] problems are ours.”
Disruption to the supply chain due to the pandemic has created a perfect storm to push for a more sustainable supply chain, says Hobby.
“All the supply chain component shortages right now are wreaking havoc. If you can influence the supply chain to make things last longer, be repairable, or be redeployed, it’s future proofing. It’s all about innovation.”
Tips to boost your sustainable procurement career
- Go deep: Elouise Epstein says, if you want to do sustainability well, “go really deep. Don’t just talk about sustainable packaging, that’s the pre-conversation. Ask detailed questions that don’t get asked. If you’re going to go into this profession, you have to get beyond the surface level questions.”
- Collaborate: Clare Hobby: “Don’t go in alone. Work with your peers. Find your friends – they’re out there. The ones that do sustainable procurement really well have built a team, and they’ve built a culture around doing this well. They have a whole bunch of different stakeholder voices so they can integrate this into the core business.”
- Network: Elouise Epstein says, “I don’t mean networking in the traditional sense; we now have procurement communities because sustainability is a problem that transcends all companies. Communicate with one another and share because that’s the only way we’ll tackle these problems. They are much bigger than any one company can solve.”
We know sustainable procurement has big pay-offs.
That’s why this year’s Big Ideas Summit Chicago will focus on sustainability. We’re ready to empower businesses to lead the charge to establish greener supply chains and procurement processes.
Our Big Ideas will be delivered by internationally renowned speakers to our fully digital event. So what are you waiting for? Register today to secure your place!
