Enhance your sustainable logistics procurement with our Procurement Playbook
Why is the Procurement Playbook needed?
The challenge in procurement is balancing operational needs with minimizing negative environmental and social impacts. Traditional practices prioritize cost and efficiency over sustainability. SFBA's procurement workstream addresses this by raising awareness and enabling professionals to source low-carbon solutions from logistics service providers (LSPs).
Procurement plays a crucial role for freight buyers, extending beyond a mere transactional relationship with suppliers. The SFBA procurement workstream aims to enhance the procurement process, aligning it with sustainable logistics objectives. By integrating sustainability into tendering and evaluation processes, the workstream offers support to make procurement a driver for sustainable practices. It will provide valuable resources, guidance, and tools to assist in sourcing sustainable solutions, fostering collaboration, and enabling effective decision-making throughout the procurement journey.
The aim of the Procurement workstream is:
In collaboration with Implement Consulting Group, developed a comprehensive Procurement Playbook. This playbook will serve as a practical guide for organizations looking to incorporate sustainable practices into their logistics procurement processes. Through a series of eight workshops, we engaged stakeholders, shared knowledge, and collectively developed strategies and best practices to drive sustainability in logistics procurement.
Download the Procurement Playbook
Key Highlights of the Procurement Playbook:
- Streamlining the procurement process for effective sourcing of low-carbon solutions.
- Pinpointing crucial sustainable criteria to enhance logistics procurement.
- Practical tools and mechanisms for inclusion of sustainability in any sourcing strategy, RFI, RFP and evaluation.
The playbook guides shippers and freight buyers in optimizing sustainable logistics procurement by aligning with recognized standards. Drawing from leading companies' best practices, it provides practical guidance on what changes to the existing procurement processes we need to make and why. The aim is to:
- Provide a full procurement process based on current sustainable knowledge and maturity.
- Help build demand signal and standardization through an harmonization of the process and focus on key metrics.
- Offer a framework for logistics procurement activities that is applicable irrespective of time or location. Future in-depth analyses will further bolster this framework with specific and contextual data.
In the Procurement Playbook, we introduce two strategies for procuring sustainable logistics services: Transformational and Transactional. The most effective blend of these approaches is determined by assessing the strategic importance and market accessibility of the sustainable logistics services under consideration. The Procurement Playbook provides an upgrade of the traditional transactional procurement process through a revision of the following milestones of the process:
- Sourcing strategy
- Specification
- RFI/RFP
- Evaluation
- Performance management
The procurement workstream helps members with
Collaboration
A collaborative program to accelerate transition to sustainable procurement
Guidance
Guiding shippers and freight buyers on how they can use procurement as a mechanism to decarbonize their outsourced freight
Sustainable Sourcing
Highlighting the role of procurement in sustainable sourcing of logistics services
During this workstream we will focus on delivering a procurement playbook which enables freight buyers to source low carbon solutions from LSPs
.
Based on real-life procurement use cases across all modes of transport
.
No sophisticated content – rather concrete and practical recommendations / checklists
.
The buyers’ and sellers’ perspective will be included in order to create synergies and make it easy to apply and follow for both sides
.
Both, the purchasing and the sales processes of logistics services will be considered. The common touchpoints will be analyzed, and recommendations developed on how to jointly design these touchpoints, e.g., what conversations need to take place at the different touchpoints
.
The participants' contributions/information will be collected before / in-between the workshops. They will be summarized, and the content of the guide drafted. During the workshops, the content will be aligned, and the next steps agreed
The Procurement Playbook workstream will allow you to address key challenges such as:
- Does the traditional procurement process still work?
- How do we innovate the way we specify and contract zero-emission logistics?
- How do you reward high performance in zero-emission logistics?
During the Procurement Playbook workstream you will be asked to contribute in the following ways:
- By engaging in working sessions
- Sharing your procurement challenges/strategies and ideas
- Bringing your knowledge and expertise related to procurement to the table
To learn more about or start your participation in the Procurement Playbook workstream contact Neha Tripathi at neha.tripathi@smartfreightcentre.org
Other SFC Projects?
Fleet Electrification Coalition project
The Fleet Electrification Coalition (FEC) aims to speed up large-scale e-truck deployment by leveraging the power of demand aggregation.
Other SFC Projects
See all other projects run by Smart Freight Centre
