We recognise our responsibility to manage the social and environmental impacts that result from our purchasing decisions.
We have many different suppliers who provide a range of products and services. We spent £151.5 million on suppliers in 2012 (£164.7 million in 2011).
We aim to ensure that all aspects of our business are conducted in a way that minimises, as far as possible, any ethically, socially and environmentally harmful activities or processes.
The concept of dealing with suppliers in this way is less well evolved in many of our markets than in the UK, so the process of embedding responsible supply chain-management into the business is a challenging one.
We have responsible supply chain-management principles which set out clear standards for operating in an environmentally responsible way. This involves reviewing the environmental performance of our key suppliers and working in partnership with them to develop policies and practices that minimise the environmental risks within our supply chain.
How we are improving our supply chain management:
- The Group procurement manual integrates responsible supply chain-management requirements into internal procurement processes. Each of our businesses has established processes for contract review, sign off and compliance monitoring
- In 2012 we undertook a comprehensive revision of our responsible supply chain management materials, producing a new supplier checklist. The new checklist assesses suppliers in corporate governance, corporate sustainability and product specific sustainability issues. We have developed tailored product related questions for four key sustainability industries, customer-facing suppliers, online brokers, ICT suppliers and car fleet suppliers.
- 2012 also saw a training programme on responsible supply chain management for all purchasing professionals in the business and other interested internal stakeholders
- From 2013 onwards the responsible supply chain management checklist will be mandatory as part of the procurement process with all higher value suppliers. Performance against the checklist will play a part in supplier selection.
‘International Personal Finance’s core European IT systems and services are located in a data centre which is managed for us by Fujitsu Services. In 2012 we transformed our Data Centre by taking advantage of virtualisation technology that resulted in IPF using a smaller number of more powerful computers, leading to significant financial and environmental benefits. The project has delivered roughly an 80% decrease in both the energy consumed and the overall carbon footprint, meaning that we’ll save about 700 tonnes of greenhouse gases each year..’
Tamsin Fraser, Sustainability Officer