Yawn!

Too many late nights beavering away on presentations, I’m afraid.

Yawn again!

I am looking forward to my pudding on Christmas day, actually.

Even bigger yawn!

Oh no, here comes yet another article on sustainability. Does any one actually understand any of this sustainability guff and what it will mean for the corporation?

2007 will surely go down as a watershed year as far as sustainability is concerned. On the one hand people really did start to take stock of what was being said. On the other, the quality of thinking around what this means for the corporation is still nascent. Everyone seems to be all too willing to recognise how important the topic is to their organisation, but few seem to have got to grips with the answers, or even started to understand what the questions are.

We as a community of professionals who have linked our careers to the procurement space, must work to understand what sustainability means for us; I have argued before that procurement functions have a central role to play in addressing the sustainability issue; the purpose of this essay is to outline some thinking around how this could happen.

First off, it is worth defining what sustainability in the context of the current debate means; at its simplest the term means the extent to which the environment around us can be maintained at a certain level indefinitely – i.e. the current conditions which are so conducive to life as we know it today. So for the corporation, presented with this definition, the challenge is understanding whether their economic value generating activities have had, or will have some kind of negative impact on the environment.

For my own part I like the broad appeal of this challenge – it means that nothing can slip through the net! He must be mad, I hear some of you cry. Nothing of the sorts – making the breadth of the challenge as broad as possible is important, as it goes some way to answering the next question, namely, what are you going to do about addressing it? For the corporation to make sure that they have taken the right steps, there really is no other option other than going back as far as is necessary to understand what are the implications of the day-to-day economic generating activities.

Having a first tier of suppliers that can testify to being greener than green is no good if it transpires that somewhere along their supply chains somebody is doing a very good job of clearing large swathes of the Amazon to mine nickel. Starting with this mindset, sets a very high bar indeed for the entire supply chain; but the hope must be that in time the philosophy will eventually propagate its way down the entire supply chain.

And by the way, forget about offsetting in the first instance – it has to be treated as a second choice. The real challenge is substituting existing processes, technologies, and energies with more efficient options, which means innovation. Innovation is driven by collaboration, which is built on trust derived from a healthy working relationship with your external third parties. The bulk of these third parties, are usually suppliers, whose relationships should be governed by the procurement function.

The high degree of supplier/supply chain content should demonstrate why procurement has, and must have an important part to play in supporting the organisation in finding the answers to these questions.

Economic activity needs suppliers, people and an idea. It’s procurement’s job to keep tabs on the suppliers, and make sure that the contribution that they can make is fostered and rewarded appropriately when it comes to addressing the sustainability agenda.

Merry Christmas everyone – in the words of John Lennon, let’s hope it’s a good one.