Procurement Professional is the official publication of CIPS Australia.

Collaboration sees sustainable sourcing success

03 Feb 2010

Source: Sustainable Sourcing, 27 January 2010

An innovative sustainable sourcing programme, pioneered by some of the biggest names in the corporate world, is gathering momentum – and making a genuine difference to suppliers across the developing world.

Set up in 2006, the Programme for Responsible Sourcing (PROGRESS) – which is made up of some of the biggest FMCG companies in the world, including Mars, Unilever, Nestle and Kraft – aimed to take a more collaborative and efficient approach to supply chain management.

And as the group continues to grow, Andy Parton, vice president procurement, Mars, believes it’s an example of how a more co-ordinated approach can deliver results.
“We felt that there was a lot of work going on in the industry from a vendor assurance and food safety perspective which was not particularly efficient,” he tells Sustainable Sourcing. “Lots of us share the same suppliers and place very similar questionnaire and audit burdens on them.

“We felt that in order to move forward and speed up the level of assurance we had around sustainable sourcing it would be better if we pulled resources and pulled together to try and bring this forward more rapidly and effectively as a group.”

It certainly appears to have the desired effect, with both the companies involved and their suppliers feeling the benefits of an approach that could soon be rolled out across other industry sectors.

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