During this year’s CIPS Sustainable Procurement Summit, the Vizibl team noted a few key trends. Chief among them was a real focus on the importance of (and difficulties with!) supplier engagement for the procurement organisations looking to increase their supplier sustainability. Read more about the conference below and get your free copy of our guide “Top 10 tactics for better supplier engagement”.
On the 19th and 20th of April, CIPS hosted their 2023 Sustainable Procurement Summit, an event designed to bring together procurement professionals to discuss tangible actions that they can apply in their organisations in order to support business sustainability goals.
With Vizibl sponsoring the event, our team took part in myriad conversations and sat on roundtable discussions. Our founder Mark Perera also delivered a keynote on “pursuing data perfection versus taking action” in procurement’s net zero journey, in addition to leading a roundtable discussing suppliers’ core role in the sustainability of large businesses.
The event was a great opportunity for procurement professionals to have candid conversations about the challenges that ESG poses to the function; one member of our team commented that it’s the most forthcoming that speakers have been about what they’re struggling with in their teams at any event he’d attended over the past two decades.
With legislation and regulatory pressure around emissions ramping up as we struggle to keep the Paris Agreement in sight, scope 3 objectives were top of the agenda, dominating about three quarters of the conversations we had.
Another hot topic (and one of particular interest to us!) was supplier engagement – two of the four roundtable discussions concerned strategies for engaging with suppliers on ESG issues, and many of the delegates who spoke to us at our sponsor stand discussed the challenges they’re facing in this area.
We have long lauded the benefits of Supplier Collaboration and Innovation (SC&I) for delivering on key business objectives, particularly in the sustainability space. While true SC&I is a supplier engagement strategy which delivers the most value back to businesses, there are other lighter-touch tactics which businesses can use in order to engage their suppliers.
Those who successfully harness a robust supplier engagement strategy will be better positioned to deliver not only on ESG goals, but also on goals around innovation and growth, risk and supply chain resilience, and business model transformation.
Prior to the CIPS conference we’d also been thinking deeply about the importance of supplier engagement, and paired with our partner Supplier Day to write our newest guide: Top 10 tactics for better supplier engagement.
In the paper we cover the key use cases of better supplier engagement and offer 10 tactics – ranging from lighter-touch to more involved strategies – to help procurement organisations achieve this engagement.
You can get your copy of the full paper using the form below, though this infographic will give you a quick taster of what it contains:
