High Impact Procurement
Through High Impact Procurement, organisations in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area – from startups to SMEs and corporates – contribute to a fair, sustainable and innovative procurement environment. We focus primarily on Diversity & Inclusion in recruitment and retention of employees at a strategic or management level. Please get in touch, especially when you would like to contribute.
Why should you make an impact through your purchasing?
With every euro you as an organisation spend on products and services, you have the option to choose the more sustainable, fairer or more innovative alternative. This makes procurement a key driver for a smart, green and healthy future of the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area. The Amsterdam Economic Board is initiator of this movement.
What do we do?
For their own core business, all organisations purchase their specific raw materials, services and products. Almost every organisation needs generic purchases, such as energy, office space, ICT, catering, office furniture and transportation. If we’d all make an impact when purchasing, hiring or leasing these facility items, the returns on that investment would be interesting in may ways:
- It would encourage the demand and supply for things that contribute to a smart, green and healthy future, such as: clean transportation, circular furniture and healthy catering.
- It would reduce the demand for things we actually no longer want, such as: fossil energy and disposables.
Check the news articles and our quickstarts for more information about High Impact Procurement.
This is what we are working on
The focus of the working group Purchasing with Social Impact, which the Amsterdam Economic Board has formed with partners, is on the procurement of personnel at strategic and management level. We focus especially on promoting diversity & inclusiveness (D&I), by discussing possible barriers in the field of D&I. We also collect best practices and share them with the network to take steps forward.
We like to point our network to the Dutch website ikwilcirculairinkopen.nl. Here you can also find the quickstarts we have developed. These offer various sectors concrete tips and practical tools for facility purchasing with impact in their own organisation.
We try to apply High Impact Procurement with all our initiatives. For example, several organisations are collaborating on the procurement of circular softshell jackets. Others combine their procurement expertise for circular and energy-efficient data servers.
Results High Impact Procurement
By now, a large part of our network has embraced high impact (facility) procurement. They increasingly demand and offer products and services that contribute to a smart, green and healthy future. This also reduces the demand for unsustainable stuff. The Amsterdam Economic Board’s efforts resulted in the following:
-
- The Socially Responsible Purchasing (MVI) checklist (Excel download in Dutch) gives you an easy insight into the level of circularity you’ve already attained while purchasing for some key facility product groups. This tool is based on PIANOo’s criteria for SRI.
- We collect relevant procurement criteria for data servers and circular solar panels, at the Circular Labs we organised with Utrecht University and AMS Institute. We unlock those data for our network.
- We have put together a working group to explore any questions in the area of Purchasing with Social Impact.
Learn more about how to get started with sustainable purchasing right away.
Invitation to collaborate
Has your organisation embraced impactful Facility Procurement? Would you like to share your expertise and experiences? Or would you like to know how to start a movement in your organisation? Then please contact Marjan Schrama.
