BUYING BETTER, BEING BETTER The value of social procurement and how to achieve it By Jim Timlick Sarah Aspinall, BGSD Consulting.
Social procurement is becoming an increas ingly important part of doing business as more and more companies, community or ganizations, and governments try to figure out how to buy better and be better at the same time. At its core, social procurement is about le veraging existing purchasing to not only get the products and services a business, gov ernment department, or organization needs, but to also drive positive change in the com munities it serves. One Calgary-based expert says that while virtually everyone agrees it’s a noble endeav our, many businesses and governments are often left wondering where to start when it comes to creating and implementing a social procurement policy. “The ‘how’ is the hard part, especially in governments because of all the applicable laws, regulations, and trade agreements,” says Sarah Aspinall, founder and principal of BGSD Consulting. There are a variety of things you have to navigate, including cre
ating a shift within organizations towards a more social value culture.” Social procurement is a concept Aspi nall has more than a passing familiarity with. She worked for the City of Calgary for seven years and helped the city develop its own social or benefit-driven procurement program. She formed her own consulting company last year to help other companies and organizations develop their own social procurement policies and programs. BGSD provides social and sustainable procure ment advisory services to both government and private businesses and is in the early stages of developing tools to support imple mentation. Aspinall says the first thing she tells cli ents who are looking to set social procure ment policy is to come up with an overarch ing plan. That includes determining what their overall strategic goals and objectives are, the actions and changes that will be re quired to achieve them, and how they will monitor and measure results. She also em
phasizes the need for resources and resilien cy to develop such a plan and see it through to implementation. “It’s really about understanding that this isn’t something that’s done quickly. You need to plan, you need to resource it, and you need to know that you’re going to be on this journey to implement it for quite some time because it’s a change in behaviour and cul ture that’s been in place for years,” she says, adding larger organizations usually need to take a multi-year approach. Such a plan should include a thorough examination of a company or organiza tion’s supply chain and who it’s comprised of, especially if supply chain diversity is a key objective. Many of Aspinall’s clients are surprised to learn how diverse their supply chains already are. The next step, she says, is to figure out how much business is being done with those groups and then determine “what can I do differently to reduce any further barriers within the current supply chain.”
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