Max HenryFounder & Executive Director, Global Supply Chain Council (GSCC) · Founder & Executive Director at Global Supply Chain Council (GSCC)

The Importance of Sustainability in Supplier Relationships

29 Apr 2024 · 1 min

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1:13

In this segment, the speaker argues that sustainability must be a mandatory component of procurement RFPs and scorecards, recommending a typical 10% weighting. They stress that omitting sustainability sends mixed messages and that both internal teams and clients should be held accountable for enforcing these criteria. The discussion highlights the need for industry-wide coalitions to standardize sustainability requirements across the supply chain, enabling consistent expectations from clients to suppliers and further downstream. The speaker also acknowledges the practical difficulty of auditing not only direct suppliers but also the suppliers of those suppliers, positioning coalition-driven best practices as essential to address these multi‑tier auditing challenges.

Chapters

You can't go to your suppliers and not have sustainability as an RFP component and as a scorecard component in your RFPs, right? It just— it's— you're just sending a very mixed message then, right? So that's— and that's something— that's a conversation we have internally in implementing sustainability with a 10% weight, you know, in our RFPs. That's also a conversation we try to have with our own clients, right? holding them accountable for that. To Mohit's point earlier, which I think was really interesting, you know, industry coalition. I think this is one of the conversations that need to happen at industry level whereby we all commit to implementing, to having supply chain as an RFP component, right, from our clients to us to our own suppliers, which kind of addresses then the second question you raised, right, about the number of layers to which you can go. Because the truth is that We want to— if it's hard enough to audit our suppliers, but auditing the suppliers of our suppliers, I think, is, is, is, is quite a big ask, right? And that's where those coalition initiatives, right, that really cement the organization around best practices are essential to driving that.