Surviving Zombies and Your Next RFP: 3 Ways to Influence Sustainability for a Better World

Your RFP process plays a key role in supporting your sustainability efforts. Explore three easy ways to ensure your vendors are sustainable from the start.

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Creating a supplier sustainability program is a little like being the leader of a group of survivors during a zombie apocalypse. When building your society or sourcing sustainable suppliers, you have to ask the right questions, consider answers carefully and create clear policies so everyone is on the same page.

In a zombie apocalypse, when you’re gathering survivors, you need to ask them some questions. What’s your name? What skills do you have? Can you shoot a crossbow? How do you and the people you work with protect yourself from zombies? These questions help you assess your current state and make plans to sustain your group’s long-term health and societal success.

Likewise, when you kick off a sustainability initiative, you ask your existing suppliers questions. What are your current sustainability practices? How do you plan to improve moving forward? How do you measure success? With these questions, you establish a baseline and create a plan for improvement. However, far too often, new sustainable sourcing policies focus primarily on managing current partners and neglect to address vendor selection. 

Ultimately, not asking sustainability questions in your sourcing process and RFPs is like admitting newcomers into your survivor colony after asking if they have any food allergies, but not if they follow protocols for bite prevention.

This oversight means that you may welcome them and grow to rely on them, only to find out that they aren’t (and never were) following standard undead avoidance procedures.

Consequently, these parties introduce risk, create more work for you and threaten the future of your society. As the leader of this zombie-free zone, you have to ask the right questions at the gates to ensure each new member understands your expectations and plays their part in protecting and preserving the community.

Admittedly, it’s not a perfect analogy. But, you get the idea. How businesses select the vendors they spend money with matters. And, procurement professionals can influence sustainability improvements, even if their organisation doesn’t follow any formalised requirements. Small changes in your sourcing process have the power to make a meaningful impact.

Luckily, incorporating sustainability into your RFP process doesn’t have to be complicated to be effective. Get started with these three steps: include questions in your RFPs, add sustainability to your RFP scoring criteria and proactively share your sustainability statement with potential vendors. 

3 ways to improve supplier sustainability from the start

1. Include questions about sustainability in your RFIs and RFPs

The fastest (and easiest) way to influence vendor sustainability is to create a set of questions that you can select from and add to any RFx. Alternatively, you can create and issue a separate sustainability assessment as a part of your RFP process. Ideally, your questions should cover environmental, societal and economical sustainability efforts.

Just like the other questions you include in your RFP, sustainability questions should be reviewed and customised to fit the procurement project at hand. Try to use closed-ended questions as much as possible to make your proposal scoring and vendor comparison process easier. In addition, phrase questions in a way that addresses a supplier’s current state as well as their future plans for improvement.

Finally, avoid vendor question fatigue by only asking questions that are relevant to the project and important to your decision. In addition, it’s important to be as specific as possible and define what supporting documentation you require. 

2. Add sustainability to your evaluation requirements

While simply adding questions is a good start, it won’t automatically lead to improvement unless you give the sustainability section weight in your RFP scoring. Certainly, it’s unrealistic to make sustainability your primary consideration. However, even giving the subject a small amount of weight can make a difference.

When determining how to score vendor sustainability for a particular project, context is important. For example, a high-spend, strategic construction project, where a vendor potentially has a significant environmental impact, a 10-15% weight may be appropriate. On the other hand, a tactical, software purchase with limited spend may only warrant a weight of 5%. Alternatively, you may consider bundling sustainability and compliance questions in your weighting. This approach still enables you to take the topic into consideration without complicating your scoring calculations.

You may find that despite including sustainability in your scoring, the least engaged supplier still comes out on top. Don’t worry, all is not lost. Consider making incremental sustainability improvement goals a part of your negotiations and ongoing vendor evaluations.

3. Create and share a supplier sustainability statement

Ideally, your business already has an internal sustainability policy that offers an overview of your purpose, practices and goals. But, do you have an external-facing policy? 

Undoubtedly, you field countless inquiries and requests from prospective vendors. By creating and sharing a supplier sustainability statement, you set expectations early. In a couple of paragraphs, you can express your company’s commitment to sustainable sourcing, outline how you measure your efforts and provide guidance for interested vendors. After you’ve written it, there are a number of ways you can share your policy with prospective vendors. 

Publish it on your procurement page

More and more businesses are creating procurement pages on their website to share information with interested vendors. These pages often include frequently asked questions, a guide for how to engage with your business and more. Consider including a brief sustainability statement on this page — not only will it help vendors, but it will also boost your reputation as a business that’s invested in sustainability.

Include it in your vendor profiles

If your business uses vendor profiles or RFIs to gather and catalog vendor information and updates, it’s a great place to include a sustainability statement and basic questions. Maintaining vendor profiles also enables you to factor in sustainability when shortlisting vendors to include in an RFP.

Send it with your response

Even if you send a simple email response to vendor inquiries, consider attaching your sustainability statement. After all, if they’re eager enough to send you a cold email, they’re probably open to sustainability suggestions.

RFP questions about sustainability

Your RFP templates probably already have some questions that explore sustainability topics, but it’s important to review them regularly. At least once a year, ensure that the questions align with your organisation’s larger initiatives and goals. Here are a few examples to help get you started.

General sustainability questions

• Do you have a corporate responsibility policy? If so, please provide it.
• What sustainability accreditations and certifications do you hold?
• Who in your business monitors, manages and reports sustainability efforts and impacts?
• Do you measure the sustainability performance of your vendors and subcontractors?

Environmental sustainability questions

• Do you track, report and manage your use of energy, water and chemicals?
• How can we partner with you to enhance environmental sustainability in our mutual supply chain? 
• Do you use renewable energy?

Societal sustainability questions

• Does your company track its diversity makeup by job level?
• How does your organisation give back to or serve your community?
• Do you enforce a supplier code of conduct? If so, please provide it.

Economical sustainability questions

• What business value have you seen from your sustainability efforts?
• How does your company’s innovation impact your customers?
• How do your organisation’s hiring practices affect local economies?

Circling back to our initial analogy, both zombie protection and sustainable sourcing are about being proactive. By intentionally and purposefully including sustainability policies that protect our future in every stage of procurement, including the RFP process, we can create a positive shift in the way we connect with the planet, our partners, suppliers and vendors, as well as our customers. We must make these changes now to ensure that sustainability isn’t a trend. Because, ultimately, we can’t afford to let it be.

How do you ensure your suppliers are sustainable from the start? Share or comment to let us know and continue the conversation.