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Social Purchasing Action Steps

There are 7 action steps we recommend as a means to leverage your purchasing activity to create social value. Most of the steps have several levels and options to consider as you develop your social purchasing practices and engage with your suppliers and community.

  • STEP ONE: Integrate New Goals with current CSR or Purchasing Strategy
  • STEP TWO: Identify Opportunities
  • STEP THREE: Establish Milestones and Metrics
  • STEP FOUR: Internalize Motivation and Vision
  • STEP FIVE: Engage Suppliers and Collaborate with Networks
  • STEP SIX: Celebrate Your Successes!
  • STEP SEVEN: Remember the KISS principle... Keep it Simple and Social!

 

STEP ONE: Integrate New Goals with Current CSR or Purchasing Strategy

Identify your goals and integrate social values into your procurement practices strategically and prioritize initiatives according to how they will help meet your social goals.

Your organization needs to identify the social objectives of your purchasing goals and align these with appropriate procurement practices. Do you want to create employment for persons with disabilities? Create economic opportunities for inner city or Aboriginal businesses? Increase business opportunities for local, small businesses? Let these goals spark awareness and action in your organization.

 

STEP TWO: Identify Opportunities

Identify social enterprises that can benefit from your purchasing and identify ways that spending can be directed towards these organizations.

Examine your existing inventory of purchased goods and or services. Which of these could be better served by social enterprises? Some examples of business goods and services include catering, flowers and gifts, cleaning and janitorial services, printing, landscaping, coffee suppliers, courier services, product assembly, event space rental, and event management services. Review the social enterprise goods and services at the Canadian Social Enterprise Marketplace.

Provide a resource list of prefered suppliers for discretionary purchases

Many purchases are discretionary, such as catering, minor printing and some travel, even for large corporations. For purchases like these, it would be beneficial to have a database of preferred suppliers which include social enterprises. Having a centralized database of screened suppliers for different product categories and regions would benefit staff. A "preferred" list will also send a positive message to both employees and suppliers.

Unbundle large contracts

Social enterprises are sometimes too small to bid on large contracts. Purchasing organizations can help by unbundling large contracts. As an example, instead of asking for bids on a contract to supply 100% of the coffee, paper or cleaning services required, a large organization could ask for two separate bids: one bid to supply 70 to 95% of those services and a second one to supply the other 5 to 30%.

Encourage and reward large suppliers to subcontract or otherwise engage social enterprise

Purchasing organizations can also request that large suppliers subcontract to social enterprises. For example, as part of an RFP, contracts with large sole suppliers can specify that sourcing materials or services from social enterprises will have a value in the bid valuation process.

 


STEP THREE: Establish Milestones and Metrics

Start with benchmarking and establishing metrics.

It is important that the organization understand where it is now, where it wants to go, and how to measure what it does. Without this it is impossible to identify progress and priorities.

Establish both short and long term goals.

Create a plan and identify priorities for each year. Look at all options and decide where to start, where your purchases can have the greatest impact, where your organization wants to be in five or ten years and how it plans to get there.

CSR objectives need to be incorporated into performance criteria and staff rewards need to factor in these objectives.

Departments, branches and staff need targets, goals, accountability and incentives. Behaviour will follow expectations and rewards.

Rely on third party certification wherever possible.

It takes time and resources to ensure suppliers meet social, ethical and environmental standards. Third party certification exists in many product categories and these mean purchasing agents can spend significantly less time conducting due diligence than they otherwise would need to do.

  

STEP FOUR: Internalize Motivation and Vision

Policies need to be mandatory across the organization.

It is important to have a consistent message and practices, both internally and externally, to clarify your procurement positioning.

Engage internal stakeholders.

It is important to get input and engage internal stakeholders. Functional users from different departments need to become subject experts on sustainability so that they can indentify their own objectives which will create buy-in and allow the people who know the supplier relationships to best identify what initiatives are worth pursuing and with whom.

Provide expanded informational resources to employees making purchasing decisions and effectively communicate the existence and benefits of these resources.

Examples of resources could include a purchasing guide or reference book for employees, online resources listing already pre-screened "preferred" suppliers, and workshops on sustainable purchasing practices.

 

STEP FIVE: Engage Suppliers and Collaborate with Networks

Engaging suppliers is key.

It is important that suppliers know your policies, practices and objectives. Through discussions and relationship building, solutions, common areas of interest and benefits can be identified. There may be ways to form partnerships between suppliers, large and small, to support sourcing from social enterprises.

Supplier engagement could take the following forms:

  1. Communicating with all suppliers through letters, policy statements, RFPs and presentations.
  2. Working with individual suppliers 1-on-1 to identify strategies and solutions.
  3. Engaging with groups of suppliers through roundtables and discussion groups.
  4. Working 1-on-1 with another best practice buying organization to influence common suppliers.
  5. Working with informal groups of other organizations to engage and influence large common suppliers.
  6. Working with formal existing organizations, such as the BuySmart Network, to engage and influence common suppliers or suppliers as a whole.

Actively participate in groups, networks and associations that work with similar purchasing objectives and buyers to influence common suppliers.

It is through active participation in such organizations that you can network with other businesses and keep abreast of what others are doing.

Weighting of CSR factors in RFPs needs to be clear and visible, although flexible depending on the product or service.

Weighting CSR considerations in RFPs sends a message to suppliers and the market as a whole, and allows for effectiveness of policy as well as transparency.

If tangible weights are not given to social enterprise factors in a tender then it is difficult to quantify the value of a bid and facilitate consistency of evaluation.

Many organizations claim to take CSR into consideration when awarding contracts, but very few have gone to the next step and actually have procedures to put policy into practice.

 

STEP SIX: Celebrate Your Successes!

Put a system in place to record and recognize successes.

There should be a place that departments can send their success stories and where staff across the organization can be informed of initiatives going on within the company.

Posting noteworthy goals and accomplishments will provide other departments with ideas and motivation and help accountability.

Campaigns can encourage contributions (e.g., best success story of the month can win a prize or all contributions worthy of posting can be entered in a draw) and exceptional stories can make valuable content in an organization's annual report.

 

STEP SEVEN: Remember the KISS principle... Keep it Simple and Social!

Priority should be on keeping things simple and effective.

Purchasing procedures need to be kept simple and operationally efficient. Initiatives to leverage purchasing dollars for greater blended-value-bottom-line returns need to be practical to implement. Initial focus should be on a few things, with an emphasis on experimenting, innovating, and impacting society through purposeful social purchasing.

 

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