Our suppliers have a significant impact on our sustainability performance. This is why we rely on close collaboration, strong partnerships and mutual commitments to responsible business conduct with our supply chain.
Based on our material assessment, we categorized ➜ our material topics. In the stream Operations with Impacts, we push ➜ climate action and ➜ resource efficiency ahead. Moreover, we look beyond our own premises and take our suppliers with us, ensuring supply chain sustainability.
At Beckers, we strongly believe that we can only achieve our sustainability goals in cooperation with our key suppliers. That is why we look beyond our own company and work together with our suppliers on sustainable solutions, pursuing constant enhancement. Ongoing global crises are affecting the entire value chain and reinforce the importance of a resilient and sustainable supply chain. With this in mind, we continuously aim to improve our processes and take action that demonstrates this commitment. Our overall goal is a 100% alignment of our worldwide supply chain partners with our responsible sourcing strategy by 2030. Specifically, that means that all suppliers must sign our Supplier Code of Conduct, 85% of our raw material suppliers have to be assessed and approved by our sustainability rating system and100% of our high-risk suppliers are audited on regular basis. A detailed description of our targets and our KPIs is available here.
Our key raw materials come from fine chemical industry suppliers, and we maintain long-term relations with all of them. We rely on the products and services provided by our partners, and we cooperate to achieve better synergies and to understand, assess and mitigate potential risks along our supply chain. In 2022, we had 842 active direct suppliers for raw materials and packaging on five continents. We want all our upstream supply chain partners to operate according to the same corporate social responsibility standards as Beckers. Because geopolitical challenges continue to affect the entire supply chain, our resilience was put to the test in 2022, again. Nevertheless, we managed to preserve and even improve our sustainability along our supply chain – working together with our suppliers.
Every supply chain bears potential environmental and social risks – downstream and upstream. Accordingly, suppliers have a significant impact on the sustainability performance of any business. At Beckers, we have identified potential risks along our supply chain regarding human and children’s rights, waste management, the nature and sourcing of raw materials, resource efficiency and carbon emissions. For this reason, assessing our suppliers is essential. We identify, monitor, control and forecast potential hazards at an early stage to forestall risks ahead of time and to resolve or mitigate them. With the implementation of our ➜ Chain-Up! program, including an ➜ EcoVadis assessment, we act accordingly and do our share to contribute positively.
For more information on the management of human and children’s rights, click here. If you would like to know more about our resource efficiency in our own operations, you can find information here. The management of carbon emissions is described in detail here.
It is essential that we have an effective way of managing the suppliers that support us at different locations around the world. To do this, we have used a collaborative tool that helps our sites manage the process locally and monitor the status of every single supplier since the introduction of ➜ our Supplier Code of Conduct in 2017.
We ask all our key suppliers to conduct ➜ EcoVadis assessments. EcoVadis is a global provider of sustainability ratings. Its ratings cover a broad range of non-financial management systems including environment, labor and human rights, ethics and sustainable procurement impacts. These are rated via in-depth assessments that require suppliers to provide proof for each of their claims. A supplier must score a minimum of 40 points in each of the four segments of the assessment to achieve Beckers’ approval. Those who fail must work through a transparent corrective action plan towards a reassessment. This process allows us to take our suppliers with us as we move our industry in the right direction. The procurement team monitors the raw material spending with EcoVadis approved suppliers on a global level, and check the suppliers' EcoVadis scorecard when they are newly introduced.
We conduct our own in-house audits on selected key suppliers to verify their compliance with our Corporate Social Responsibility and quality expectations. Our procurement team selects suppliers to audit based on a risk assessment that includes factors such as industry or sector, self-assessment results, length of relationship and previous performance. We work together with the audited supplier to improve quality control and sustainability performance, share proposals for improvement and request action plans within a specific time period. This approach has brought about remarkable improvements.
See ➜ our operations magazine
Additionally, to our Chain-up! program our key suppliers receive an annual performance evaluation. We introduced this new part of our annual supplier performance evaluation system in 2020 and now have a global tool and process that complements our Chain-Up! program. This gives us a global overview not only about supply quality but also about how those companies score regarding R&D and sustainability. Cooperation potentials are highlighted for the suppliers and the individual category managers follow up the individual action points and the suppliers will receive a new rating every year.
We want to inspire our supply chain partners to work with us and make a positive impact on our industry around the world. This is the basis of our annual Beckers Supplier Award, which we established to acknowledge the effort and commitment involved in making improvements. It is a formal recognition of the supplier that has made the most progress during a year. We work with outstanding partners and appreciate their efforts and commitment. We hope that more of our suppliers will join us on this journey. The Beckers Supplier Award is granted annually and the winner announced in the Beckers Sustainability Report. The award underlines our belief that we can advance sustainability standards across the industry with committed collaboration and clear communication. See ➜ our operations magazine
Beckers has taken up the challenge to reduce the CO2 footprint from the inbound material supply between suppliers and our sites, a major part of the scope 3 CO2 footprint. We strive to halve this footprint by 2030. Pilot projects with key suppliers were kicked off in 2022 to jointly study the opportunities and effects on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like supply lead time and on-time delivery. Several supply chains have been converted from road to multi-modal transport. Challenges are the logistic infrastructure, which needs further development in Europe and the necessary external allyship that still needs to evolve. We are a pioneer in this topic. In 2023, we will start similar pilot projects with selected customers in outbound logistics.
Beckers formulates customized products for customers using raw materials manufactured by the specialty chemicals industry. The innovation power and CO2 footprint of Beckers’ finished products depends largely on suppliers’ input. In 2022, we started a project for “renewable carbon” at Beckers. With key suppliers, we are working to monitor the current CO2 footprint of our raw materials and to reduce this footprint by introducing carbon sources other than fossil –for example, recycled waste, bio-based or from carbon capture technologies. We are actively working with upstream partners in the raw materials supply chainto explore and develop new technologies and approaches. Technologies currently under development in the upstream supply chain to produce well known materials from such alternative routes offer tremendous potential for Beckers to reduce our product carbon footprint mid-term.
We engage with our supply chain partners through various projects within the Chain-up! Program and the Beckers Supplier Award described above. Furthermore, our Global Director Sustainability Partnerships ensures our sustainability commitment is reflected in the quality of our suppliers. Our suppliers are also part of our stakeholder engagement surveys.
To find out more about our stakeholder engagement click here.
Our strongest commitment lies in ➜ our 2030 Sustainability Strategy and goals that we have long communicated. Within Supply Chain Sustainability, the ➜ Supplier Code of Conduct as well as the commitments of our Chain-up! program are extremely important.
Our Supplier Code of Conduct defines our basic requirements regarding legal compliance, human rights, bribery and gifts, workplace practices, business ethics, environmental protection and supply chain. We expect all our suppliers and subcontractors to adhere to our Supplier Code of Conduct and implement management systems to ensure compliance with all applicable laws.
Due to our actions, we contribute to the achievement of the ➜ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) decent work and economic growth (SDG 8), responsible consumption and production (SDG 12) as well climate action (SDG 13).
