Operationalize Sustainable Procurement with the Celonis Sustainable Spend Management App

With new regulatory and public pressure, such as the German Supply Chain Due Diligence Act taking effect as of January 1st, 2023, procurement teams need transparency across suppliers more than ever. And they play an increasingly important role in helping companies realize their sustainability goals.

Buyers and category managers now need to factor in sustainability when making already complex buying and sourcing decisions. But with data in silos, understanding and improving supplier sustainability performance is laborious and manual.

Meet the Sustainable Spend Management app purposely built for procurement teams to effectively allocate spend based on environmental, social and governance criteria. With Celonis’ deep understanding of procurement processes, the app unifies scattered data sources and ensures teams can quickly and intelligently identify and remove spend associated with high-risk suppliers and improve rating coverage among their supplier base.

This Celonis app was developed in collaboration with both Ecovadis, a leading sustainability ratings platform, and IntegrityNext, a leading cloud based supply chain monitoring and ESG risk management system. The app is available in two different versions, one specifically for EcoVadis and the other one tailored to IntegrityNext.

What makes it challenging for procurement teams?

Large supplier base: Many of our customers operate with a massive supplier base, ranging from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of suppliers across the globe. Evaluating the spend for each supplier along with their ESG rating is already time consuming, let alone improving the status quo.
Siloed data sources: The data required to analyze sustainability and spend is scattered across siloed data sources and systems and is challenging to access, verify and consolidate.
Manual effort to generate insights: It can be extremely manual to construct analysis or dashboards to analyze supplier sustainability and associate it with procurement spend. Most organizations still use Excel to manually estimate sustainable spend.

How does the app empower procurement teams?

The Sustainable Spend Management app is a single solution to view, prioritize and efficiently manage supplier sustainability. Using the app, buyers and category managers can:

Review sustainable spend and supplier ratings across the supplier base

First, Celonis automatically accesses and consolidates supplier sustainability data from EcoVadis or IntegrityNext and your procurement transactional data all in one app. The app enables you to review vendor sustainability performance holistically, directly access detailed rating scorecards across the supplier base and assess spend associated with each supplier.

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Prioritize suppliers based on risk, rating coverage and specific ESG criteria

From there, the app flags suppliers without a rating and pre-defined high risk suppliers, so you can prioritize and allocate spend towards vendors with the most optimal sustainability performance.

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Streamline actions to request and improve sustainability rating

Finally, the app enables automated actions to request sustainability ratings for unrated suppliers and trigger reassessment when a rating is about to expire, so category managers can ensure continued rating coverage. You can also directly request EcoVadis or IntegrityNext to work with your suppliers through corrective action plans to improve their ESG performance.

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With these powerful features, procurement teams can ensure optimal supplier sustainability performance following regulations, spend wisely towards the most sustainable suppliers and improve productivity drastically.

And that’s why the world’s leading sustainable companies like LyondellBasell, Archroma and Wienerberger are pioneering with Celonis to embed sustainability-based decision making in day-to-day procurement operations.

Operationalize Sustainable Procurement with the Sustainable Spend Management app

You can learn more about the Sustainable Spend Management app through watching our Celosphere Sustainability solution session on-demand and through our press release on Celonis sustainability apps.

Celonis customers can also reach out to their contact for assistance implementing the app.

Additionally, visit our corporate sustainability page for more on how Celonis is driving sustainability internally and externally, one process at a time.

The Celonis Execution Management System reveals and fixes inefficiencies so customers can source products from responsible and reliable suppliers, make products with minimal waste, move products more efficiently, and even ship products on-time with minimal emissions. And because it works by optimizing current systems rather than replacing them, it’s a fast, minimally disruptive, and minimally capital-intensive means of simultaneously driving top, bottom, and green-line value.