Aligning our values and practices with our suppliers

PwC is not a manufacturing company with an extensive multi-tiered supply chain. However, we are a significant purchaser of goods and services, such as air and ground travel, hotel rooms, and office supplies, including paper.

We believe we have an opportunity to leverage our purchasing power to influence social and environmental performance in our supply chain in these areas. Our responsibility to understand and manage the social and environmental impacts of these procurement activities is not only an important area of focus for us; it is aligned with our responsibilities as a signatory to the United Nations Global Compact.

As such, we developed a Supplier Code of Conduct that outlines our supplier expectations. We see the Vendor Code of Conduct as the starting point for a rich and sustained dialogue with our vendors and we periodically measure their adherence to that code and gain insight into their leading practices through a survey of our largest suppliers in the US.

We are currently working to transform the survey into an interactive tool that our suppliers can use to benchmark their performance against other PwC suppliers. We have developed a dashboard that will enable suppliers to compare their survey responses to those of other anonymous suppliers in the same category. In this way, we hope to provide our suppliers with some value in return for their participation in the survey and help them drive continuous improvement. This approach will be applied to the results of our third survey, which launched in March 2012. Our previous survey, conducted in FY10, had 107 supplier participants, an increase of 19% compared to the baseline survey.

Supplier diversity

We believe that a strong supplier diversity program is a key component of how we select our suppliers. Our ongoing supplier diversity initiative seeks out qualified minority- and women-owned business enterprises (MWBEs) that can offer competitive products and services to the firm, and our purchasing policy states that we will act on opportunities to do business with qualified MWBEs. We also support MWBEs through our membership in the National Minority Supplier Development Council and the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council.

The amount we spend with MWBEs and other diverse suppliers has steadily increased over the past three years. In calendar year 2011, more than 9% of our managed procurement spend went to Tier I and Tier II diverse-owned businesses. While we are constantly working to increase the amount we spend with diverse-owned businesses, we also aim to achieve broader results. Beyond the numbers, we work to improve the quality of our relationships with diverse-owned businesses: we mentor and support key diverse suppliers, and provide them with scholarships at select universities that help diverse suppliers improve their business operations. Since 2008, we have increased our spend with diverse-owned businesses from 8.2% to over 9% in 2011. Our goal is to continually improve both our spend and our support of diverse suppliers that provide goods and services to PwC.