It feels like procurement consulting firm Proxima has been around forever, but actually it is “only” some 25 years or so. The firm morphed from an initial cost reduction focus to an outsourced service model, but in more recent years, the business has become one of the leading international consulting firms working across the procurement space.
A few weeks ago, Proxima announced a new “service line”, offering services around sustainability to potential clients. Given our interest in procurement with purpose, I thought it would be interesting to catch up with James O’Neill, who is leading this initiative at the firm. So, I asked him, how did this all start for the firm?
“It really was an internal focus to begin with,” he explained. “We saw the industry shifting and realised that we had an opportunity to look at our own impact – so we adopted the United Nations SDGs and created a strategy for Proxima. That meant taking some immediate short term actions such as making sure our supply chain is living wage compliant, and working more with social enterprises. We also put a spot light on things like waste, recycling and set up various DE&I initiatives. This is all part of an ongoing strategy”.
That effort then started transferring into client work. “We’d always been delivering project around this space, but we started seeing much more demand from our clients, so we codified our thinking and experience into clear packages, and now we’ve got three product offerings”.
The first is Sustainability Assessment, which focuses on what the organisation is doing, where the opportunities might lie and developing a vision for sustainable procurement in the organisation. “For most organisations, supply chain is THE big opportunity in terms of driving sustainable business”.
The second theme is Acceleration. “That’s about identifying projects and deploying initiatives. For instance, we’ve been helping a very large transport and technology business move towards an all-electric vehicle fleet, and we are talking to lots of businesses about emissions”.
Finally, Transformation , which means helping organisations embed sustainable thinking into procurement processes, practices and behaviours. “We’re helping clients think long-term about how to drive positive action”. That means incorporating the thinking into category management and (for instance) into assessment criteria within supplier selection processes. That’s something we are increasingly seeing in the public sector, of course.
“The vision and strategy often needs to start from the centre”, O’Neill says. That can come from the procurement function, but it might also be a sustainability champion or a strategy group that pushes this work. “You have to create interest and aspiration, and then targets and goals that you can push into the business”.
What about prioritisation of initiatives? “Yes, there can be difficult decisions to make balancing profit and purpose, although some easy ones too. Potential impacts have to be assessed, in particular by looking at the needs of the business and key stakeholders – that’s often the customer in the private sector”.
Proxima also works in the public sector, where the emphasis is increasingly on social value and “social wellbeing in the community” as O’Neill puts it. Social value in that sector is now also used as a catch-all which incorporates issues such local economic value, social initiatives and environmental priorities such as de-carbonisation. In fact, “the public sector is leading the way on many fronts”.
But there are challenges. “Public Sector buyers are coming to terms with the new perspectives on what constitutes value, and how to measure it – there is a little bit to get to grips with”.
The UK and Europe are well positioned internationally in terms of progress made in the public sector, although O’Neill sees signs that with Biden in charge, the US is quickly shifting its position as a government buyer towards more sustainable concepts. “And of course many US firms are leaders in this field – Adidas, P&G and others – so momentum is building globally”.
Another driving force here is pressure from staff. “In our own intake of young professionals, the number one question we get asked at interview is around our approach to sustainable business, and we hear that from clients too. There is a lot of focus on Gen X and their views, but now it goes well beyond that into all levels of the organisation”.
We moved on to talk about technology. “There are quite mature and useful tools such as Ecovadis and Sedex, but there are further opportunities for technology to help monitor suppliers and enable buyers to have visibility across large, complex supply networks. We need help to evaluate the sustainability credentials of suppliers across multiple geographies, but we also need to do some very complex things to help us monitor supply networks and make smart informed decisions. The pace of change around Carbon Accounting, and AI-enabled decisioning is opening up possibilities to do some of the complicated things, at scale”.
I asked O’Neill about the Brewdog controversy – a firm doing great things in some sustainability areas but with other issues around staff wellbeing. How would a buyer assess whether Brewdog was a “sustainable” supplier? “Procurement professionals need a broad awareness now – way beyond simply price – if they want to create a supply chain that reflects their organisation’s aspirations and customer needs. Brewdog has just shown that these are complex issues and making assessments can be tricky”!
And O’Neill’s final point is worth noting too. It all comes down to managing change, he says.
“Procurement has always had challenges to face, whether cost, risk, or driving innovation from suppliers… sustainability is a new challenge but many of the same change management principles apply here. We find that organisations can set targets and goals relatively easily – the struggle comes with turning that into action and managing significant change. That’s really where I think we can help”.