Responsible supply chain

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. 

Transparency Map - Mapping our suppliers

We recognise transparency as a foundation of trust, something that we want to build with all our stakeholders – employees, patients, partners, healthcare professionals, governments, investors and society. So, we’re reimagining sustainability reporting by aiming to make the same information accessible to all at the same time. The launch of the new interactive Transparency Map is part of that commitment.

We are the first pharmaceutical company to share an online map showing the countries of our critical direct partners (our Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient, Formulation and Packaging, and Device suppliers). The map discloses data from 96 countries. The search by country feature explores our sourcing and manufacturing around the world involved in delivering our medicines to patients, as well as our access to healthcare programmes, site environmental and wellbeing status, and information related to intellectual property and healthcare professional payment disclosure practices.

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