The development of a tool to analyze the sustainable procurement strategy of companies

Abstract

In the last years, there has been the collapse of the Rana Plaza, a building where employees of a clothes manufacturer supplying brands such as Mango or Primark were working, the Volkswagen software case, and less recently, the case of child labour at Nike’s suppliers. All these social and environmental scandals affected the brand image of those companies and, with other factors resulted in a growing awareness of the importance of CSR and sustainable procurement as those scandals often relate to the supply chain. Consumers are thus more and more interested in CSR, which urges companies to do so, to engage in CSR, and thus, those companies hire more and more consultancy firms in order to be helped in this revolution in the business life. The purposes of this thesis are thus to study the phenomena of CSR and sustainable procurement, but above all to develop a tool that will help Deloitte in its consultancy missions consisting in developing sustainable procurement strategies. The first part of the thesis studies thus the emergence of CSR and sustainable procurement and their impacts on different stakeholders. Nevertheless, the main objective of the project remains the development of the tool. This tool is a survey that companies hiring Deloitte for a consultancy mission in sustainable procurement will have to answer in order to identify the elements that the mission will aim to improve in priority. Consequently, the second part of this report studies several frameworks in order to define the frame of sustainable procurement. Afterwards, a review of best practices, existing initiatives in terms of responsible purchasing and of the practices of collaborating companies enables to take actual business practices into account in the tool.The next step consists in developing the survey while adapting it to different sectors and weighting it thanks to a benchmark of several materiality matrixes in 13 sectors. Once the tool is developed, the following consists in testing the tool on the collaborating companies in order to check the working of the tool and to do a case study. Finally, the last part of the project is the assessment of the tool quality, the identification of its strengths but also of its weaknesses and of what could be done to improve the tool.