At the recent UK Universities Procurement Conference in Exeter, three esteemed institutions vied for the award for the best “Responsible Procurement Initiative”. Delegates voted for their favourite, and the result was very close between the three candidates, with Lancaster University winning by a short head.
Like many other universities, Lancaster declared a “climate emergency” in 2020, and then set a target to become net zero by 2035. A member of the leadership team has led a programme to address emissions in areas such as business travel, and clearly, procurement has a huge role to play in addressing emissions from the supply chain in particular.
But to implement sustainable procurement and address areas such as business travel and Scope 3 emissions successfully in any organisation, it is essential to have the support and commitment of the budget holders and other key internal stakeholders. Those people are the real decisions makers for most spend categories - if they don’t buy in to the ideas and practices of sustainability, then there is little that procurement can do alone.
So, the initiative at Lancaster – which is still very much a work in progress – has focused on increasingly the visibility of the decisions those stakeholders take. That has been achieved through the development of a Procurement and Travel Carbon Dashboard. Users can see emissions for their relevant account codes or departments, and data can be sorted by supplier, category of spend and cost code to provide an in-depth breakdown of Scope 3 carbon emissions, enabling departments to identify and analyse their highest-emitting activities.
Data provided by the Higher Education Supply Chain Emissions tool (HESCET) gives the basic estimates for emissions related to spend categories. But HESCET was designed for retrospective data, long after the actual decisions or expenditure. Lancaster wanted something that was more “live” in nature. The data was also somewhat dubious in places. For instance, “travel agent” spend was given a low emissions number in the database – but if you are booking flights and paying for them through the agent, rather than the agent simply acting as an intermediary, then that clearly has a major carbon impact.
So the team worked hard to improve the data, and to make it more accessible and user-friendly, with the ability for departments to directly obtain reports and charts using Tableau. The data is still retrospective but much closer to real time - the next step is to bring in predictive capability, to inform choices with users looking at “what if” options in terms of their buying.
“This is giving us the ability to prioritize discussions with our stakeholders”, says Larissa Morrish, Head of Procurement at Lancaster. “Whilst the data isn’t perfect, it is stimulating discussion and action”.
There has been some limited pushback from users in the business travel area, but in general the initiative has been well received – the main comment from users is simply that they want better and faster data. “This is also a much more positive and strategic conversation for procurement to be having with stakeholders, rather than just talking endlessly about efficiency and costs”, says Morrish.
There is also a parallel work stream engaging with major suppliers. This includes collating supplier sustainability activities in the NETPositive Futures Supplier Engagement Tool and via contract management plans. Lancaster is also part of the pilot group for the new NETPositive Futures Net Zero Carbon tool. Morrish also wants to start tagging “more sustainable suppliers” on the platform, and provide more guidance to suppliers and budget holders.
Eventually, suppliers may be barred if they don’t move in the right direction, but as Morrish observes, it took the world hundreds of years to sort out accounting standards, and we’ve only been developing carbon and other sustainability standards for a decade or so – it is no surprise that there is still much to do. “But we feel we’ve made a good start”, she says.
Finally, I asked her if there were any interesting examples of colleagues using the tool and making interesting decisions. Two senior staff members chose to get the train rather than fly to a conference in Leipzig, which is really quite a trek from Lancaster. I’m not sure the carbon versus time equation quite works there, but as Morrish says, “it was partly about setting a good example and showing what is possible”. With that sort of commitment, Lancaster surely can’t fail.