How do we help suppliers protect the environment?

In todays globalized business landscape, environmental sustainability has become a pressing concern for companies across varying industries. Beyond focusing on their own ecological footprint, companies are increasingly recognising the importance of monitoring and tracking the environmental performance of their suppliers.

This article will outline to you how HARTING plan to work with our suppliers to achieve that aim.

The Goals

HARTING has set an Environmental goal of having all locations carbon neutral by 2030. This is a tough and ambitious target. Nevertheless we know, these are only our Ourown emissions and the majority of the product carbon footprint originates from the value chain. Therefore we decided to enhance the target to our suppliers in the improvement as well.

Collecting the data

However, before we can measure any improvement in the environment performance of our suppliers, we first need to gather data from them to determine our starting point. But before we can determine our starting point, we need an efficient method of collecting and then analyzing the data.

There are many suppliers of ESG platforms (Environment, Social, Governance) who provide this type of service. A team of environmental and procurement experts assess the various offerings from these suppliers and recommend one to partner with on this journey.

Selecting the platform provider

We started by identifying our needs.

We needed a platform provider who had an international reach that matched our own, with the ability to have questions posed to our suppliers in their native language. The platform had to be “user-friendly” for our suppliers, with the ability to expand the scope from gathering environmental data to also, at a later date, collect other Social and Governance data. Importantly, we discovered that some of the providers of these platforms charge suppliers for entering and for editing their data and we felt that this could be a barrier to future cooperation and transparency, so ruled out those that followed this practice.

The platform also had to allow us to determine the environmental risks certain suppliers in certain industries and countries may pose. This information will be of use when selecting new suppliers.

So, after many meetings and watching many PowerPoint presentations, with many different platform suppliers we decided to partner with a company called Integrity Next. They have a bias towards engineering and manufacturing customers and have 1 million suppliers in 195 countries currently registered on their platform.

So what next?

We plan to start the communication and education process with the staff in our Global Procurement team and with our suppliers early in the new fiscal year and then start to gather our first dataset.

Integrity Next will also provide training to those suppliers not familiar with such platforms and provide other training materials to help them answer specific questions.

Conclusion

As I mentioned during the introduction of this article, many companies now view environmental sustainability as a duty they must fulfill. We are convinced that this cannot be done by each company on its own, but needs to be considered over the whole value chain. We took the first step and will go the journey together with our suppliers.

Taking responsibility is a belief that our company has held for many years now and our Chairman - Philip Harting - regularly talks on this subject on LinkedIn. The expression of these beliefs - through various investments in environmentally friendly technologies - is visible in many areas of our factories and offices. It is through this project that we will take the next logical step of expanding these beliefs into our supply base.