Responsible supply chain
What is Responsible supply chain at AstraZeneca?
Company processes for sourcing external resources, including building robust supplier relationships with considerations of suppliers' environmental and social practices.
Our approach
We support suppliers in building their own sustainability capabilities and by holding them to high standards. We aim to work only with suppliers whose values are consistent with our own.
Throughout the life of our relationship with each supplier, we seek to ensure that their conduct matches the expectations outlined in our Global Standard Expectations of Third Parties. AstraZeneca a member of the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain Initiative (PSCI) and supports its principles for Responsible Supply Chain Management for ethics, labour, health and safety, environment, and related management systems.
We envision a supply chain that delivers commercial benefits to our business and to our partners, while meeting our aspiration for supply chain sustainability – creating a supply chain that is inclusive, resilient and transparent.
Inclusive
Suppliers create value for all employees and people within their local communities.
Resilient
Suppliers’ operations are adaptive to climate change and resource scarcity.
Transparent
Sustainability practices across our worldwide supply chain are readily verified
Our key targets and progress
See the Sustainability Data Summary for all metrics and methodology
Our stories
Positive Sourcing
In 2019, we launched our Positive Sourcing programme for sustainable procurement driven by our collective responsible sourcing actions – actions that create a more inclusive, resilient and transparent value chain. Our ambition is to achieve 100% ethical spend – ensuring that all categories have a sustainability strategy and performance measures in place by 2025.
To kick off this ambitious objective, we ran our Positive Sourcing campaign – a week-long event kicked-off by our Chief Procurement Officer to drive further awareness and engagement of our employees on the importance of responsible sourcing practices. We actively monitor business risk and promote responsible sourcing practices in a number of ways:
Monitoring business risk - Through our third-party risk management process (3PRM), we select suppliers to complete required assessments to maintain oversight of our supply chain and where we are spending our money, therefore reducing our risk. In 2019, 89% of spend was assessed through our 3PRM process.
Promoting Responsible Sourcing Practices:
We promote responsible sourcing practices by working with suppliers in four ways:
1. deliver AstraZeneca’s sustainability targets
2. support our suppliers with their own sustainability journey
3. innovate together to meet today’s sustainability challenges
4. promote supplier diversity across our markets