Our commitment to responsible business
extends to ensuring that we work only with suppliers who embrace standards of ethical behaviour that are consistent with our own.
This applies across the full range of our purchasing activities, from promotional items to pharmaceutical ingredients, and includes any specialised work for which we use external contractors to complement our in-house effort. It also applies as much to our expanding business in emerging markets as it does to our existing supplier relationships.
Our goal is to work with our suppliers to ensure they meet our standards, as they in turn apply such standards to the suppliers that they work with in the delivery of goods and services for AstraZeneca.
We prefer to encourage improvement rather than automatically exclude suppliers based on unacceptable CR performance, but we will not use suppliers who are unable or unwilling to improve performance in a timely manner.
Our Global Procurement function leads the development and implementation of our procurement strategies and objectives, and is accountable for overall performance. They work closely with the Global CR Team and compliance networks across the organisation to provide the support, expertise and training necessary to ensure our requirements are understood and applied by all those involved in procurement on behalf of AstraZeneca.
During the first half of 2009, we revised and strengthened our CR Principles in Purchasing, which we first issued in 2003 to provide guidance for our purchasing community on integrating CR into their activity. In June 2009, we launched the strengthened guidance in the form of a new mandatory Global Responsible Procurement Standard, which provides the framework for developing and implementing the programmes needed to ensure that we effectively and consistently incorporate our standards of ethical behaviour into our procurement activity worldwide. All relevant Procurement personnel have completed Responsible Procurement training and, in addition, our Code of Conduct refresher training includes a short Responsible Procurement awareness module.
A ROLLING IMPLEMENTATION
Integrating responsible business considerations into the many thousands of supplier relationships we have around the world is a significant challenge for a company the size and scope of AstraZeneca. We aim to ensure that our approach to integration is consistent, but practical and flexible to reflect the wide range of suppliers that we have and the level of business or reputational risk involved. The same approach, for example, may not be applied to a major supplier of chemical intermediates as it would to a company from which we are purchasing office stationery materials. AstraZeneca’s expectations remain the same, but the degree of assurance applied will vary according to the risk classification of a particular supplier.
Our new Standard is designed to provide a consistent framework that delivers assurance of alignment with our expectations, proportionate to the level of risk that a supplier poses to our business.
This builds on the ongoing work of recent years. Starting in 2003, when we first launched our CR Principles in Purchasing, we focused initially on the US, the UK and Sweden – our three main business hubs where over 80% of our suppliers are based, and last year we extended the geographic reach to other countries where we have major marketing, manufacturing or research activities. These include Japan, China, India, Canada, Mexico and Puerto Rico, as well as more countries in Europe. CR considerations are being included in all new contracts and master agreements in these countries and work will continue with existing suppliers in line with the new Standard.
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