Together with our suppliers, we aim to firmly establish sustainability throughout our supplier network. With this in mind, we refined our three-step risk management process in 2012 and introduced additional supporting measures for employees and suppliers, so as to facilitate continual improvement and increased sustainability throughout the entire supplier network.
Our global supplier network with more than 12,000 suppliers in 70 countries makes a significant contribution to success of the BMW Group. Within this network we have many longstanding partnerships with suppliers and businesses. Our cooperation is characterized by a shared understanding of product and production quality, supply chain security, price credibility, and innovative strength as well as the continuous integration of sustainability.
In order to achieve this, we aim to identify and subsequently enhance potential in areas such as the efficient use of resources, as well as to reduce environmental, societal and governance related risk. Considering the magnitude of the global supply and value-added chains, composed of a large number of suppliers and sub-suppliers, our demands present a considerable challenge, but also a great opportunity.
Within the BMW Group, responsibility for the development of a sustainable supply chain lies with our Purchasing and Supplier Network division and the specialist departments Sustainability and Environmental Protection and Raw Materials Management. The objective is to enable our purchasers, suppliers and business partners to integrate aspects of sustainability such as environmental, social and governance standards into their operations by implementing process-related and capacity-building measures.
Measuring Sustainability, Making Progress. Since 2009 we have been measuring different economic, societal as well as governance related sustainability performance indicators throughout the purchasing and distribution networks for the new BMW i brand. Based on our experience with the performance indicators used to measure the sustainability of BMW i suppliers as well as further analysis, we have developed a set of performance indicators that will gradually be applied to all of the BMW Group’s suppliers. These include, for example, the evaluation of the sustainability assessments.
Therein we differentiate between reporting indicators (monitoring figures), control indicators, and target indicators. The former are supported by concrete and quantifiable target values, while we use control variables for the control process. Reported indicators such as the proportion of suppliers with an environmental management system according to ISO 14001 or the number of supplier manufacturing sites which provide a self-assessment are used mainly to measure progress on our sustainability efforts. An example of target values would be the proportion of secondary aluminium or recycled plastics in automotive parts.
Different performance indicators have important implications at various levels of the BMW Group’s day-to-day work. Therefore our metrics are developed and anchored in the corresponding purchasing process and systems, so that the relevant employee has the optimal amount of information. As a result, management is provided with the aggregate metrics in a steering tool, while purchasers are provided with detailed information to be used for direct monitoring.
