Sustainability, Transparency and Sourcing Responsibly in Retail
67% of Retail companies say their environmental sustainability priorities are likely to change significantly in the coming year, according to our latest sustainability survey, but 17% of these organisations don’t have a sustainable procurement strategy to back this up .
Furthermore, 75% of companies have a net zero strategy citing waste management and climate change as key Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) drivers over cost savings, which only 33% of retail procurement teams documented as an ESG issue.
With this in mind, retail companies looking to focus on responsible sourcing and transparency will need to address supplier risk and climate related issues to have a real world impact in 2023 and beyond.
Challenge
Supplier Risk
Retail organisations largely take a risk-based approach to sourcing responsibly to avoid modern slavery and unethical business practices in their supply chain. From buying goods manufactured in high-risk countries to human rights and labour practices, the risk of the supply chain falling short of responsible business practices is high.
Climate Change
Reducing the packaging on goods for resale (GFR) and plastic reduction in supply chain is another key environmental challenge for the retail sector. From external customers demanding less packaging to complying with government mandates on carbon reduction and single use plastics, this is one challenge that will not be solved overnight, but one that must be tackled head on.
We can help retail businesses overcome these challenges with global supplier prequalification and range of audits suited to your needs, from carbon reduction and ethical business, to quality management and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).
Solution
Taking the hassle out of prequalification, our dedicated team collect, validate and monitor thousands of suppliers globally, allowing you to focus on achieving your sustainability goals, including sourcing responsibly in retail.
Our insights dashboards provide a high-level view of your whole supply chain, allowing you to effortlessly evaluate performance, identify risks including health and safety, modern slavery and CSR.
Visibility
We collect and validate supplier information globally in multiple languages with real people – not just web-crawling. We also score your suppliers on any of the following areas; financial, health and safety, human rights, sustainability and governance to give you more transparency. Our scoring algorithm provides a high-level view of how your supply chain is performing, useful when looking to improve the supply chain in certain areas, allowing you to focus on the suppliers who need it the most.
Compliance
Supplier profiles show the company name, incorporation year, registration status, whether the company has been audited by our team and if the audit is still up to date. Adapt data views to your specific needs – compliance, risk, strategy – and spend more time making decisions and less time collating and analysing spreadsheets.
Benchmarking
Understand how your supply chain measures up to your standards or other industries by benchmarking suppliers against different industries, your own qualification criteria or self-created lists of suppliers.
Interrogate the data to determine if your supply base reflects your organisational values, leveraging our ‘explore’ functionality for supplier groups, and demonstrate competitive advantage in the market, by highlighting the strength of your supply chain.
Gain confidence in your whole supply chain, including Goods Not For Resale (GNFR) and indirect categories.
Results
Save time collecting data and spend more time on strategic ESG initiatives within your supply chain.
Supplier Onboarding
A UK retail company recently onboarded 80% of their key GNFR suppliers in record time with our dedicated account management team and onboarding processes.
Our global validation team, carry out over 90,000 questionnaire validations a year – along with over 10,000 audits. Combined with our access to specialised third-party data streams, their work ensures that we don’t just know suppliers’ credentials – we know them for certain.
ESG and CSR Scoring
ESG scoring is also available, based on the prequalification questionnaire and third-party external data for a comprehensive view. Buying organisations can determine the ESG, CSR, and health and safety scores of individual suppliers and benchmark against the whole supply chain to determine and evaluate risk.
Understanding the sustainability scores of suppliers will allow buyers to make better decisions that align with the businesses own ESG and CSR goals, further reducing carbon emissions within their supply chain and unethical business practices that are present in certain areas of the retail sector.
Supplier Engagement
Supply chain risk management doesn’t stop with the data. Our holistic approach to risk management includes enabling buying teams to engage with their supply chain through meet the member events, webinars, supplier days and more.
Using Performance Feedback, buyers can drive performance improvement through highlighting common issues and continual benchmarking of contracts as well as facilitating communication with the supply chain, encouraging 360-degree reviews and implementing improvement plans.
