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fortil 
A practical guide to making your procurement strategy more resilient to environmental and regulatory challenges.
Regulatory pressure on environmental data and the integration of Scope 3 (indirect emissions) into carbon footprints now place procurement teams at the forefront of corporate decarbonization.
Faced with growing demands, there is a temptation to multiply requests for justifications (carbon footprints, SBTi trajectories, product carbon footprints, etc.). But is this always relevant?
In this guide, we explore:
- Why Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) can enhance your sustainable procurement policy.
- The pitfalls to avoid when using LCA in procurement.
- How to structure a comprehensive approach for sustainable procurement.
- Concrete solutions offered by NUMTECH to support buyers and suppliers.
Demand more than decarbonization from your sustainable procurement policy
Why go beyond product carbon footprint?
Carbon footprint is often the first indicator used to assess a product’s sustainability. However, this analysis is incomplete: a product with a low carbon footprint may still have a high impact on ecosystems or water pollution for example.
LCA provides a holistic view by evaluating 16 environmental indicators (climate change, resource depletion, acidification, eutrophication, etc.). It meets the need for decarbonization analysis, while integrating other essential impacts for your CSR policy.
Target your impact reduction levers more precisely
In carbon accounting, procurement is often a "black box": at best, a generic emission factor; at worst, a monetary factor.
When certain procurement categories are significant, LCA comes into its own: it refines the product’s emission factor and can even drill down to the process level. This is the ideal lever for identifying your most contributing suppliers, not only in Tier 1 but across the entire value chain.
The challenges of integrating LCA into a tender process
Despite its benefits, integrating LCA into procurement processes faces several obstacles:
Data that is difficult for buyers to exploit
Tenders often end up concentrating all of a company’s expectations, and buyers can become overwhelmed with data:
- Lack of standardization: each supplier uses its own methodologies.
- Difficulty in comparing: without LCA training, buyers struggle to construe the data.
- Risk of greenwashing: some data may be biased or incomplete.
A challenge for suppliers
Many suppliers, though willing, face difficulties in producing a product carbon footprint or LCA due to a lack of resources or data, the diversity of reference frameworks required by different clients, etc.
Requiring LCA results as early as the tender application phase can introduce bias, favoring large suppliers, often the only ones with the resources to produce these documents at this stage. This can create an imbalance in the client-supplier relationship, to the detriment of a genuine partnership on technical, financial, and environmental issues..
Moreover, if the product is still in the early stages of design, it may simply be impossible to conduct an LCA that is sufficiently representative of the final product!
Think beyond the tender process
To avoid these pitfalls, it is wiser to adopt a long-term approach:
- Refine the expression of needs to focus on priority issues.
- Set means-based criteria rather than result-based criteria during the tender phase.
- Identify suppliers with whom a continuous improvement approach for their environmental footprint is possible.
How to integrate LCA into your procurement: methodology and best practices.
Step 1: Train and support procurement teams (and beyond)
First and foremost, it is essential to train all stakeholders involved in procurement (buyers, product managers, designers, etc.) on sustainable procurement issues:
- Understand the link between the company’s carbon footprint and sustainable procurement.
- Understand the eco-design approach.
- Familiarize themselves with the terms and reference frameworks used in the field.
Step 2: Refine the expression of needs and integrate the "total footprint of ownership" concept
Beyond the traditionally identified needs (technical, cost, quality, lead time), it is also necessary to integrate environmental performance:
- Identify and prioritize the company’s issues, including those related to CSR and/or carbon footprint, particularly Scope 3.
- Analyze your procurement portfolio through the lens of LCA to identify the most impactful items (in terms of carbon, water, etc.). At what level of the supply chain are they located? Which suppliers are involved? What do they currently offer?
- Adopt a life cycle approach to assess product profitability. For example, a product that is cheaper to purchase but energy-intensive in use may prove more costly in the long run (both financially and environmentally). Collaboration between different company departments is essential to consider all stages of the product’s life cycle and redefine needs in both financial and environmental terms.
Once these elements are analyzed, they can be integrated into the procurement strategy.
Step 3: Engage suppliers in the long term
Depending on the impact mapping and the state of the supplier panel, several actions can be considered:
- Create reporting for already referenced suppliers, organize audits, etc
- Work with suppliers to find solutions.
- Conduct sourcing actions if the panel needs to be enriched or adjusted: criteria for selection (qualitative or quantitative) will then need to be integrated.
Procurement department: a key role
Procurement plays a central role in balancing price, performance, and environmental impact. Beyond the initial selection of a supplier for a given product, their mission also includes supporting ongoing negotiations to improve the environmental performance of the purchased product throughout its life cycle. This approach of continuous monitoring and dialogue transforms the supplier relationship into a lever for progressive improvement, rather than a one-off transaction
Toward 100% sustainable procurement?
Integrating LCA into your procurement is not an option but a necessity to meet regulatory requirements and stakeholder expectations. However, this approach must be progressive, collaborative, and pragmatic:
- Start with high-impact products/services.
- Train your teams and suppliers.
- Use appropriate tools to simplify data collection and analysis.
- Adopt a holistic approach (TFO) for a comprehensive view of sustainability.
NUMTECH supports you
Within the fortil Group, NUMTECH and Albert&co combine their expertise in environmental performance and procurement to support you throughout this process.
Our goal: make your procurement more sustainable without weighing down your processes.
