Development of a Guideline for Implementing Sustainability into Procurement Processes of SMEs: An Empirical Investigation

The importance of sustainable procurement has increased significantly in the past decade as society and customers are attaching more and more value to social and environmental standards. Although the main focus in procurement is still on cost reduction, companies are starting to integrate sustainable aspects into their purchasing processes and are considering these aspects when identifying and evaluating suppliers. Procurement has to get away from the pure consideration of costs and become more strategic and long term oriented. This would make sustainable alternatives more attractive as they are often more lucrative in the long-run.

The topic of sustainable procurement is a significant issue in procurement and especially large companies are already very active in this area. Several authors analyzed the activities of large companies with regard to sustainable procurement. The analyzed literature, however, does not integrate small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in their investigations. Therefore, the question arises how SMEs evaluate the topic of sustainable procurement and what their status quo is in this area. This paper presents the result of a survey conducted with CPOs and purchasing managers of SMEs. The analysis revealed that SMEs already engage themselves with sustainability in procurement and that they want to get more active in the future. However, addressing the topic of sustainability remains a challenge and there is a diverse mix of measures and tools which SMEs are applying in order to enhance sustainability in procurement processes. It was further investigated that the skills and know-how of SMEs with regard to sustainable procurement are still limited and that there is considerable room for improvement. This analysis has the aim to develop a basic guideline for SMEs in order to give these companies orientation for integrating sustainable aspects into procurement processes. However, the topic of sustainable procurement can vary a lot among industries and clear options for action are still missing. Therefore, more industry specific research has to be conducted in order to establish clear options for action.