Making your Own Sustainable Procurement Strategy

As we told you earlier, a sustainable procurement strategy enables businesses to align their procurement activities to their sustainability goals and objectives. Thus, ensuring that they are still on track toward sustainability. 

In order to develop an effective Sustainable Procurement Strategy, it is crucial to ensure that all components of the final action plan align closely with your company’s overall strategy. 

If you are a member of a procurement team that has its own strategy, it is also important to incorporate its strategic principles into your plan.

Typically, the process begins by identifying the requirements of your company. It is essential to have a clear understanding of your company’s specific needs in order to formulate a well-suited Sustainable Procurement Strategy. This involves reviewing the company’s strategy, documents, contracts, and other relevant information to gain insights into its procurement requirements.

Before you create your own sustainable procurement strategy, you should map your stakeholders in relation to sustainable procurement. The most important question for you to answer is, who are my most important stakeholders internally and externally? 

By knowing this, your stakeholders will understand the different roles that they need to play to implement sustainability within the procurement processes. 

What results from the feedback from internal stakeholders as well as the data you gathered from the business and procurement strategy is a clear understanding of what the procurement plan should aim to achieve. 

Let us now go back to making your sustainable procurement strategy. It may sound like a big task in writing and developing a sustainable procurement strategy. However,  if you have everything that is needed, then you should have no problems writing and building your strategy! 

It is important to list down your goals, tactics to be used, data that was collected, and all other information that is needed. This will help you wrap up all the preparation work you have done. Just like in the other lessons, we will provide you with templates to help you out!

Your sustainable procurement plan outlines the steps you should take to ensure that your project has the greatest possible outcome. Your strategy should at least include the following:

• Key findings about sustainability risks and opportunities, needs, and the supply market
• The actions required to manage key sustainability risks
• The recommended demand-related approach (e.g. Elimination, reduction, reuse, recycling)
• How your sourcing approach delivers sustainability objectives
• How sustainability requirements are incorporated into the specification, including any go/no-go decisions
• The importance of sustainability in your evaluation criteria, carefully balancing it with other factors like cost or quality
• The anticipated sustainability benefits, such as cost savings over the course of the project
• The effects of the sustainability approach on your project’s schedule and budget

Once you have included this in your sustainable procurement strategy, the only thing that is left to do is to ask for feedback from your stakeholders, execute, and monitor the effectiveness of your strategy in your procurement process. 

Do you want to learn more about creating your own sustainable procurement strategy? Then you are in the right place! 

Our Sustainable Procurement Course is a good fit for procurement professionals that want to create a sustainable procurement strategy but do not know where and when to start. Our course ensures that you will have a sustainable procurement strategy that perfectly fits your company.