The Sustainable Procurement Pledge (SPP) was created by Thomas Udesen (CPO at Bayer) and Bertrand Conquéret (CPO at Henkel) in 2019. It is a relatively informal network of procurement professionals who sign up to the “Pledge” – whilst it doesn’t require too much effort to join, it does at least show that you have some interest in the topic and there are now some 6000 members. With a new website too, SPP is now “an international bottom-up and non-profit organization for procurement professionals, academics and practitioners, driving awareness and knowledge on responsible sourcing practices and empowering people in procurement”.
Last week, Oliver Hurrey (who we interviewed a year ago here) is now also involved in running the network, and he hosted a webinar last week looking at the topic of “social procurement”. Despite an initial technical hitch that left us waiting in cyberspace limbo for a few minutes, it turned into an interesting and productive 90 minutes.
Speakers from the social enterprise side were Mick Jackson, founder of social enterprise group Wildhearts and Lucie Durand of Yunus Social Business. (It’s well worth checking out both of those organisations if you don’t know them already). Senior procurement folk from top law firm Linklaters and Zurich Insurance represented the practitioner view, both those organisations being active in promoting the use of social enterprises in their supply chains.
As well as those involved as presenters, it was good to see a wide range of interested delegates. There were numerous questions, answers and talking points, creating a lively discussion in the “chat” alongside the speakers. The contributors included academics, consultants involved in the sector, practitioners, and quite a few offered useful links - I have several websites to visit, and a Master’s thesis and a couple of reports to read following the session!
I’m not going to try and summarise the entire 90 minute discussion, but some of the interesting points included;
- The need to verify that you really are dealing with a “social enterprise” – Mick Jackson was quite scathing about organisations that are “pretending” to fit into that category without really walking the walk.
- Measurement was a topic of much interest. You can look at basic metrics such as percentage of spend or suppliers in the social enterprise sector – but measuring the benefits of programmes is difficult. That all comes back of course to why you are pursuing such an initiative, which leads into quite deep strategic questions (explored much more fully in our book of course!)
- Whilst there is a lot of willingness to use social enterprises, few currently operate at scale. So don’t expect such organisations necessarily to be able to respond to a highly aggregated, geographically spread tender.
- On a related note, there were comments that category management doesn’t help engagement with social enterprises, but really it is about doing category management properly. That shouldn’t mean simply aggregating and applying leverage. Also be aware that SEs (and indeed smaller businesses) don’t always have the time, inclination or resource to complete long and complex tenders or other documentation you issue as a buyer. Don’t create accidental barriers to entry!
- On the positive side, you should not think that using social enterprises will cost you money. Many operate very commercially. And there are other benefits as well as the general “doing good” point – having a diverse supply chain including social enterprises, as well as firms of different sizes and types, will improve supply chain resilience, without a doubt.
There were over 130 delegates participating, with very high levels of engagement – not bad for a Wednesday afternoon in January! It all bodes well for the SPP community to become more active and drive wider engagement in and understanding of these important purpose-related topics. And there is another very worthwhile SPP webinar this Wednesday, February 2nd, looking at child labour and human rights in the supply chain – you can register here (free of charge).
Finally, it was also gratifying to see positive comments about our Procurement with Purpose book in the “chat”, from people who have read it or are in the process of doing so. And do remember, there are just a few days left to get a £3 discount on the book if you order here and use the code PWP2021 at the checkout.