Ensuring sustainability in our supply chain is a long process. Besides our own measures and processes to ensure sustainability, we also have established certain measures and event concepts in collaboration with our partners to continuously drive progress. Workshops, trainings, and innovation and ideas competitions are part of these measures. The aim is to collaboratively improve supplier sustainability while enhancing resource and cost efficiencies as well as customer benefit. There are three main focus areas of the BMW Group supplier development:
Learning from our Suppliers. The forum „Learning from our Suppliers“ was introduced in the late 90’s. From 2012 on, about 25 suppliers per year present best practice case studies for innovative, optimized, and sustainable solutions for products, materials, and production processes. Further, we encourage suppliers to present their social and environmental engagement, to promote their sustainability vision, and to discuss ideas together with different departments of the BMW Group.
Presentations of suppliers have a long tradition at the BMW Group. In line with the cooperative partnerships with our suppliers these events support a mutual exchange of information about current trends and developments, newest technologies, and more sustainable solutions. Together with the most innovative partners in the supplying industry, we seek to find comprehensive solutions for sustainable mobility of the future.
Supplier Innovation Award. In 2011, the BMW Group initiated the Supplier Innovation Award to provide a platform for its suppliers to present and to communicate their sustainability accomplishments and to acknowledge outstanding innovation performance. The awards ceremony in Munich in November 2011 featured top BMW executives including Dr. Herbert Diess, member of the Board of Management of BMW AG, responsible for Development, and Dr. Klaus Draeger, member of the Board of Management of BMW AG, responsible for Purchasing and Supplier Network.
From now on, the BMW Group Supplier Innovation Award will be awarded every year, considering eight different categories, including the category sustainability. In 2011, the BMW Group awarded the sustainability category prize to the supplier “Dürr AG” for a new method of the innovative paint booth system “EcoDryScrubber”.
The environmentally friendly technology has been implemented and at the BMW Group’s Regensburg plant and has led to a substantial reduction in energy consumption and CO2 emissions during the clear coat application process.
Ideas Competition. For the BMW Group, the know-how, creativity and innovative power of their suppliers are important levers to advance sustainability of products and processes. In March 2012, the BMW Group initiated an ideas competition for sustainability solutions. The goal of this competition is to work together with the supplier to improve sustainability in product and process as well as to increase cost and resource efficiency and customers’ benefit.
Ideas or already implemented best practice solutions in the field of environmental protection, economy, and social responsibility are evaluated after concrete criteria such as originality, customers’ benefit, innovative strength, improvement in efficiency by the specialty departments. The most promising ideas are further discussed together with the supplier and the best ideas are nominated for the BMW Group Supplier Innovation Award 2012 in the category “Sustainability”.
