ESG Supplier
Management Challenge

As a leading health technology company, Royal Philips’ purpose is to improve people’s health and well-being through meaningful innovation. We aim to improve 2.5 billion lives per year by 2030. To further accelerate our ESG journey, we are seeking a highly intuitive, automated, global, ESG supplier management solution. It should solve for supplier data acquisition and provide an intelligent view of tier-n ESG supplier data, to drive insights and actions, that enables any stakeholder to take sustainable business decisions and measure the impact.
 

Challenge Details

Royal Philips is committed to addressing the ESG challenges of today and has been doing so for years. Philips’ ESG framework comprises a comprehensive set of key commitments across all the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) dimensions that guide execution of the company’s strategy. Philips’ approach is characterized by a systematic approach to structurally improve sustainability of our supply chain, including ambitious targets and detailed plans of action. Here we focus on supplier collaboration and increased transparency, instead of the traditional approach of auditing.

We are seeking technology solutions to create a comprehensive global view of our suppliers’ ESG performance and making tier-n reporting, including, adherence to all laws and regulations, as efficient and effective as possible so our teams can focus on driving impact with their ecosystems. Our ideal platform would be capable of intelligently and intuitively acquiring and interpreting multi-tiered supplier data as well as provide actionable insights to facilitate sustainable business decisions. The capability to measure the impact of these decisions is an essential factor. We aim to enable any user across our business who interacts with suppliers (tiers 1-n) to drive ESG-focused outcomes confidently.

A key component of this program involves conducting a pilot to prove the value of the proposed solution, demonstrate innovation, and assess the potential for collaboration across our ecosystem.
 

Key Requirements:

• The desired technology solution should feature a highly intuitive user experience (UX), seamlessly integrated with Single Sign-On (SSO) capabilities, simplifying secure user access.
• It should offer robust and ‘cool’ visualization capabilities, dashboarding, and reporting functionalities to enable comprehensive data analysis and informed decision-making on multiple levels (country, site, plant, supplier, product, material).
• It should allow for supplier collaboration and communication, e.g. for campaigns and for initiatives.
• The technology solution needs to include (ESG) risk intelligence for corporates, sites, and materials, for example based on country, industry, material risk and opportunity data.
• The technology solution needs to include advanced forecasting functionalities. This should consider factors such as the company’s carbon footprint and its long-term sustainability roadmap and proactive environmental and human rights strategies.
• The solution should provide the flexibility to easily configure multiple roles and workflows.
• The solution needs to be updated regularly without manual intervention on Philips’ side to allow Philips to respond to changes in global, regional and local user needs and legislation in an easy manner.
• The solution needs to possess various data collection methods, including scraping, surveys and API capabilities. Surveys need to be based on ESG standards or free format.
• We are looking for a SaaS solution with API capabilities to allow integration with both internal and external tooling, incl ERPs. This will provide the needed interoperability and extend the functionality of the platform. Examples include RBA, RMI, CDP, SBTi, BOMcheck.
• The technology solution and its content should be auditable, including audit trails and activity logs.
• The solution should support a wide range of languages to cover the needs of a global company. This should include, but is not limited to, English (US/UK), Mandarin, and preferably German, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Indonesian, ensuring it can cater to diverse language requirements.
• Compliant with Security and Data Protection Laws (e.g GDPR).
• Any joint proposition, based on already existing collaborations a technology solution would like us to consider, to allow for a full ESG scope and functionality coverage can be discussed

 
Selection Criteria:

• The technology solution should have a proven impact on efficiency and effectiveness in ESG reporting and driving impact, with a high user satisfaction from all stakeholders.
• The technology solution should provide comprehensive ESG data coverage. This coverage should encompass not just a global perspective, but also a regional and local lens, ensuring an in-depth understanding of all ESG facets across varying contexts.
• The technology solution should be capable of intelligently and intuitively acquiring and interpreting (multi-tiered) supplier data.
• The technology solution should be capable to provide actionable insights and learning to suppliers, based on their ESG performance.
• The technology solution should provide Philips as well as its suppliers means to publicly present their ESG performance and improvement in a standard and summarized manner.
• The solution should be highly adaptable to the latest insights, requirements and standards in the ESG sphere.
• The technology solution provider needs to have demonstrated experience with global corporates that heavily utilise ERP systems.