How Sustainable Procurement Can Help Deliver Outstanding Customer Experience

The need to provide a compelling customer experience should be at the heart of every organisation. For those working in procurement, this means being able to easily identify what they need to buy to help the business function effectively, and ensure it can meet wider goals around corporate responsibility.

Allowing for your business to operate sustainably is incredibly important as in this decade, this is becoming increasingly significant as a standard of success. Noncompliance with national and international legislation can be damaging to a company, but the opportunity for environmental sustainability is incredibly appealing. There is also a reduced risk of non-compliance with environmental legislation – this is incredibly beneficial for a business as non-compliance can be very costly, particularly to SMEs, and therefore staying away from those and improving your environmental considerations through sustainable purchasing.

As a business, making sustainable purchasing decisions gives you the ability to minimise the indirect, negative impacts of your organisation, its operations, and the services you deliver on the environment. Because of this – you can maximise your positive impacts on the environment through sustainable purchasing and working with sustainable supply chains.

Lastly, by purchasing for sustainability, employee and customer loyalty increases because buyers and organisations are becoming increasingly environmentally aware. This highlights the incredible opportunities that sustainable procurement can bring to your company. The benefits of sustainable procurement and purchasing can include the reduction of energy, waste, and travel costs – which reduces a business’s operational costs and increases profitability.

All businesses, no matter how small or large, need to purchase goods no matter what and we need to use our influence in a positive manner.

The most prominent factor when it comes to buying from particular types of suppliers is sustainability, which is a mandatory requirement for 59% of buyers. Four in 10 have a company direction to buy from certified small firms, and 39% from local businesses.

This, though, is not an easy matter, particularly when it comes to indirect categories of spend, which typically make up large numbers of relatively low-value transactions compared to direct spend. In fact, a staggering 85% of respondents say the difficulty of sourcing suppliers that follow sustainable practices prevents their company from setting or achieving sustainability goals for procurement.

Using technology to help create a reliable and responsive supply chain that can assist with specific demands of the business can help organisations in turn deliver high levels of service and satisfaction to their own customers. “Our objective is to enable you to be more effective and spend more time with your own customers,” says Olague.

This means putting in place rules around procurement, goals around sustainability and ensuring visibility around spend. “It doesn’t matter if you have five employees or 5,000, it’s the same process,” he concludes.