Sustainable Procurement

Delivering best practice

Sustainable procurement is the process of purchasing goods and/or services by taking into consideration economic, social and environmental benefits.  It takes into account the triple baseline of environmental, economic and social parameters while formulating sourcing strategies for goods and/or services.

Sustainable Procurement is best practice procurement

Companies and organisations can no longer avoid their Corporate Social Responsibilities. Indeed getting it wrong can have serious financial implications as well as damage to brand reputation and public image.  The advent of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the need for triple bottom line reporting has added to this pressure and as a result procurement needs to be inclusive of this.  Sustainable Procurement is now therefore accepted as ‘best practice procurement’ and failure to adopt it is seen as lagging behind this requirement.

Compliance with legislation and risk management

With strong media attention and growing awareness among consumers about the need for sustainability initiatives, a company’s reputation and brand image has become critically dependent on the inclusion of sustainability in sourcing decisions.  Companies are now coming under the microscope in their implementation of sustainable practices throughout their supply chain.  Indeed, public or private organizations cannot afford to be ‘caught out’ on unethical or illegal practices and environmental failure is not an option.

Delivering cost savings and achieving quantifiable benefit

Businesses and organizations have significant impact on labour rights, working conditions, family and community incomes, and the economic and social welfare of those that they are dependent on to achieve their bottom line.  Whether you are a large or small business, NGOs or government departments, understanding your supply chain matters.

Sustainable procurement is a robust, risk-based, commercial approach to integrating environmental and social criteria into decisions throughout the procurement lifecycle.  The objective is to reduce environmental and social impacts of procurement decisions, while maintaining or improving business value.

For private and public organisations, going to market often provides a key opportunity for achieving sustainability.  Indeed for large projects such as the North West Rail link and the London 2012 Olympics, the single best way of achieving sustainability is to embed it upfront in the procurement process.  By leveraging buying power and encouraging innovation, organisations can ensure that sustainability outcomes are achieved.  This is the purpose of Sustainable Procurement.

Our services and capability

Edge Environment has the combined skillset of sustainability and procurement.  Often these skills are separated which is why Sustainable Procurement is a complex and unique area of capability.

Our services include:

• Strategy and Framework development.   We can help you establish a Sustainable Procurement strategy for your business with a supporting framework and toolset to deliver quantifiable outcomes.  Edge Environment has expertise in embedding the BS8903 standard for Sustainable Procurement into your organization.

• Spend Analysis and Cost Savings.  Edge Environment have deep skills strategic sourcing and cost savings.  Our work in Procurement challenges the perception that ‘sustainability costs more’ and is focused at delivering cost savings whilst highlighting sustainability ‘hotspots’ and improvements in your supply chain.  Edge Environment have a proven spend analytics model that can help you adopt a category-focused approach which reviews the complete supply chain at the category and sub-category level.
• Whole of Life Costing.  Edge Environment have core skills in Life Cycle Assessments and have adapted this methodology to now include costings.  We can undertaken complex Whole of Life Analysis which incorporates Life Cycle Assessment and Life Cycle Costing (WLC = LCA + LCC).  We have a model that can be applied against assets/products and procurement packages that identifies the key environmental and financial hotspots from Cradle to Grave of the life cycle.  This analysis can provide ‘bottom line’ results both financially and environmentally and can also support intelligent procurement decision-making.
• Peer review and Assurance.  Edge Environment can also provide specific peer review advice on your strategies, sourcing options and frameworks you may be adopting.  Our services can provide you assurance that you are delivering best practice procurement that will enable you to achieve the right economic, social and environmental outcomes.