Sustainability Advisory Services

A Sustainable Procurement Strategy sets out your long-term vision to address the sustainability risks, impacts and opportunities in your supply chain. For best results, this Strategy should align with your corporate sustainability commitments and priorities. Action Plans are phased implementation plans that will help you organize your resources to reach your sustainable procurement goals.

Developing and regularly updating a Sustainable Purchasing Policy or guideline provides clarity to staff on the importance of sustainable purchasing to your organization, corporate sustainability commitments and priorities, and how to consider them in procurement processes.

Outline how sustainability requirements will be integrated into each major type of procurement process, whether sole sourcing, or multiple quotes.
Procedures that are optimized to be current and provide staff with a standard approach to applying sustainability tools within the appropriate point in the requisitioning and procurement processes. Procedures help staff know when to use new tools and how they can use the information the tools provide.

Purchasing often happens in many ways across an organization, by many different people. People need orientation to new policies and guidelines around sustainable procurement, to understand why the policy is relevant to them and how to apply it. There are many creative ways to communicate key messages to various audiences within the organization, as well as to offer interactive training sessions that inspire peer dialogue, critical thinking, and innovation. Investing in communications and training will build support for your sustainable procurement work and accelerate your success in implementation.

Engaging suppliers on sustainability is a powerful way to deepen your sustainability impact. Engagement begins with communicating your sustainable procurement strategy to prospective and current suppliers and inviting them to work with you to achieve your goals. In some cases, suppliers may be leading edge on sustainability innovation and able to help inform your expectations; in other cases, you may need to provide orientation and training. Sustainability can become a part of your vendor performance management, which can yield sustainability data for impact monitoring and reporting and lead to strategic partnerships that may yield technical and financial resources to take your sustainability program to the next level.

Staff have sustainable procurement embedded in their role descriptions and are given dedicated technical and financial resources to design, implement, and manage the organization’s sustainable procurement program.

A ‘High Impact Procurement Opportunity’, or HIPO list identifies procurement categories of special interest for sustainable purchasing, usually in industries offering a range of more sustainable alternatives and where third-party certification has been developed. HIPO lists may be accompanied by information on product categories that identifies risks, impacts, opportunities and relevant certification options.

Sustainable procurement tools help client departments and procurement staff assess risks, update specifications and evaluate bid responses. Tools could include sustainability checklists, third-party certifications, RFX language, supplier questionnaires, and weighting criteria for sustainability. Tools standardize the approach to considering sustainability.

It’s important to take regular stock of how you are doing on achieving your long-term vision to address the sustainability risks, impacts and opportunities in your supply chain. Your monitoring and evaluation plan may include contract monitoring and verification, developing key performance indicators, assigning measurable implementation targets, and evaluating success through a reporting framework that promotes transparency. Your sustainable procurement results may feature in internal reports to leadership and may be included in broader corporate sustainability reporting. We also recommend using regular review periods to check in with your team on the implementation process—identifying successes, what is working well, and bringing creativity to any challenges and barriers.

There are exciting opportunities to collaborate with other organizations—municipalities, government agencies, First Nations and non-profits—to develop larger scale, mutually beneficial initiatives. One example is building infrastructure such as charging stations for electrical vehicles, but there are many more. Collaborative buying and shared investment in market research are opportunities, as well as sharing accomplishments and lessons learned with other public organizations through the Municipal Collaboration for Sustainable Procurement (MCSP) or other sustainability communities of practice.