Responsible Procurement saves your money and protects your brand

Kirjoitettu: 14.3.2016

Our Sustainability and Compliance Officer has a very good definition: Responsible business is everything you do on top of the law. I.e. just following the law is not responsible business.

In TeliaSonera Sustainability is in the core of the strategy for several reasons. As a consumer business, highly integrated in the societies we work in, doing business in responsible way is a must. Our sustainability strategy has four points of view, Ethics, Social, Economic, and Environment. Responsible procurement being one of the focus areas in TeliaSonera sustainability work, touching all the points of view mentioned above.

We evaluate our suppliers based on all the traditional procurement qualifications, like cost, quality, availability etc. but also with increased focus on sustainability. Supplier code of conduct, defining our basic requirements on sustainability, is part of all of our procurement contracts. In addition, we have environmental and quality requirements further clarifying our requirements and ambition level. Many times doing the right thing from environment point of view is also the most cost efficient from total cost of ownership point of view, for example buying network equipment that uses less energy is not only reducing our Co2 footprint but also reduces our electricity bill.

One of our biggest and from many sustainability points of view, riskiest procurement category is Field Services, including all of our Network build and deployment services as well as maintenance services. In Field Services, we have a lot of sub-contractors in the supply chain, lots of waste from both packaging and building activities. Our contractors handle big volumes of our assets, do procurement on our behalf, and handle waste on our behalf. In this environment, both trust and good governance are required to ensure that our business is conducted in a responsible way.

We are part of industry wide occupational safety task force, providing documentation on how to conduct different installations in a safe manner. Everyone working for us, whether TeliaSonera employee or sub-contractor should feel safe in the work environment and be able to go home happy after the day in work. As part of quality and environmental certification processes, we are re-writing our most important contractor instructions and also reviewing the governance processes to make sure they are followed.
Last year we trained all our biggest suppliers, including all Field Service contractors, on our sustainability requirements. Explaining our contract documentation in a more easily understandable way. This was greatly appreciated by our supplier base.
By making sure our supplier base understands and follows our requirements, we not only save money in making our activities more efficient but also protect our brand in avoiding very costly mishaps when something goes wrong.

Antti Suorsa
Head of Procurement and Partner Management, Finland, TeliaSonera