Working with suppliers to balance corporate responsibility with price and risk.
“Trading in an ethical and socially aware way is essential for Capgemini and
our Clients in the 21st century. Our ethical principles have been incorporated
in all of our Contracts, Purchase Orders, Terms and Conditions of Purchase, RFI,
RFP and Supplier Selection and Performance Procedures for some time now, and remain
a pre-requisite for business with Capgemini. The Capgemini supply chain processes
and supply contracts will be further uplifted in the coming 12 months to fully
address all other corporate and social responsibility aspects, thus ensuring
that Capgemini and its’ Suppliers are world class in every respect ”
Wendy Irvin, Group Chief Procurement Officer
Our commitment to ethical supplier relations is reflected in our comprehensive set of guidelines on the ethics of purchasing and the selection of suppliers, and we work to ensure that the partners we choose also respect our code of ethics. We also work carefully to ensure a fair and just approach to working with suppliers.
Procurement procedures
Our procurement procedures involve:
- Treating suppliers fairly
- Selecting vendors based on value, performance and price
- Providing justifiable and transparent selection decisions
- Risk Management of Suppliers
- Ensuring contracts with suppliers have relevant clauses relating to our ethical purchasing principles
- Ensuring confidentiality of supplier information
- Maintaining an “arm’s length” relationship with suppliers
- Not taking advantage of mistakes made by suppliers
- Monitoring our suppliers to ensure that they do the same
In addition, our approach follows Chartered Institute for Purchasing & Supply (CIPS) standards.
Sustainability & CSR principles
Our suppliers must comply at least with the following principles:
- No use of forced labour or child labour
- No discriminatory practices
- Freedom of association
- Compliance with applicable local laws, particularly relating to working conditions, health and safety
These are a subset of our Sustainability and CSR Procurement Principles which we expect our suppliers to uphold. We will work with our suppliers towards ensuring their compliance. Click here to see the full set of principles.
They are based upon the 10 key principles of the United Nations Global Compact guide our activities throughout our business and those of SA8000.
Sustainable Procurement Programme
We are collaborating with our clients and alliance partners to develop joint approaches to corporate responsibility in supply chains and have an 18 month programme in the UK in which we aim to work with our suppliers, contractors and partners regarding the areas they are responsible for in order to:
- Understand the potential Sustainability & CSR risks, impacts and opportunities of their activities in relation to the products and services we buy
- Agree and put in place appropriate remedial or avoidance action plans where there may be significant risks, concerns and significant labour or environmental impacts or non-adherence to the principles
- Understand, influence and in time start to address sustainability concerns where possible in the spirit of continuous improvement
- In the event of a highly risky situation being identified and there being no commercial justification, Capgemini may chose not to engage with those suppliers
The programme encompasses:
- Review of our supplier base in terms of risk and size of spend – 97 suppliers have been identified as high risk or high spend, covering 71% of our total spend for Wave 1
- Full review with 97 prioritised suppliers – using our Sustainability & CSR questionnaire to assess supplier performance against our principles and agree any action if required – to be completed by end 2008. Reviews of our top 13 suppliers are already under way. A copy can be made available
- Assessment of all new suppliers. All new suppliers will be required to complete an outline questionnaire. A copy can be made available
In addition risk criteria have been identified in order to ensure that more detailed assessments of new suppliers can be undertaken if required. Those criteria are extensive and include, for example:
- Long supply chains utilising low cost countries where primary supplier organisation has not assessed and managed risk appropriately
- Excessive use of scarce, endangered or new natural resources
- Category specific standards. Reducing the environmental impacts in particular of items procured can be influenced by the specification for particular category items – for example the procurement of energy from renewable resources, or paper of high recycled content. We have a continually evolving set of standards which we apply to specific category items. A copy can be made available
Collaborating with our partners
In addition to more formal assessments of the supply chain we are working with some of our partners to be more corporately responsible and address Sustainability concerns – in particular around the area of Green IT – i.e. reducing the impacts of IT on the environment, through energy efficiency, virtualisation of datacentres and IT asset re-use and disposal, for example.
