David Rae

A sustainable approach to the selection of contractors helped Bovis Lend Lease win a £2.4bn contract to build schools in the UK’s second city of Birmingham according to its head of supply chain management, Nigel McKay.
 
Bovis, one of the world’s largest project management and construction companies, won the contract earlier this month, and McKay, speaking exclusively to SustainableSourcing, claims that the work done on improving the sustainability of suppliers and contractors gave his company the edge.
 
“We won that bid based on the supply chain management and diversity policies because we had all of this in place and could demonstrate it,” he said.

Mckay said that up to 30% of his working week is now spent on sustainability issues because a huge amount of day-to-day operations now include aspects of it as a matter of force. “In the company, there are five sustainability targets,” he explained. “The first one is carbon reduction, the second one is a reduction of waste, the third one is responsibly-sourced materials, fourth is community which leads into diversity and the other is sustainable design. Elements of all of those are delivered through the procurement process which is why every one of those imperatives is also in my business plan.”

Mckay has defined a new accreditation scheme called Building Confidence, a joint venture managed by Achilles on behalf of Bovis and two partners. “What we’ve done is a two-day audit to assess every one of our top-tier contractors and we have managed to get other main players and their clients involved so they’re pushing their contractors our way as well.

“We’ve got 329 companies going through this process – they’re anybody that at the moment we spend anything in excess of £100,000 a year with.”

Mckay is now in the second year of the audit process, and so far in 2009 seven out of nine contractors who failed the audit last year have now passed and achieved full accreditation. “We’re making headway now. We see this as a continuous improvement tool. We don’t see it as a way of selecting which contractors we’re not going to deal with. This is about saying to the guys, ‘look, you’re long-term partners with us,’” he said.

As part of that continuous improvement, suppliers and contractors have to join in and get involved, he said. “At the end of the day, they [contractors] have to get out of the victim mode and into the opportunity mode,” he said.

Bovis puts his contractors through a rigorous audit process, which includes several questions which are continually updated. Scores are given against each of those questions and a pass, or a fail, awarded.

The questions are, with each one receiving a score of between one and five:

• How does the company control its environmental procedures that have been produced for its activities?
• Does the organisation incorporate environmental controls into its risk management process?
• How does the company manage and assess the environmental performance of its supplier and subcontractors?
• How does the company comply with current waste legislation?
• Does the organisation participate in 1st, 2nd or 3rd party ethical audits?
• How are working hours monitored?
• Does the organisation utilise child labour in the manufacturing and construction process?
• Does the organisation have a code or policy on ethical conduct?
• Does the organisation actively engage with the local communities in which it operates?
• Does the organisation source goods and services locally (where available)?
• Does the organisation have a policy to procure fairly-traded goods where available?
• Does the organisation actively avoid sourcing materials or goods from oppressive regimes (where human rights may be impaired)?
• Does the organisation actively source goods from developing countries? If yes, do they actively try to ensure they use ethical supply chains?
• If the organisation handles materials from legal and sustainable sources, can they demonstrate chain of custody certification?
• If the organisation procures aggregates do they try to identify all aggregate suppliers and do
  they use recycled and local supplies?
• If the organisation procures cement do they try to source from manufacturers who have a strategy for reducing carbon dioxide emissions?
• If the organisation procures glass, do they try and use manufacturers that have a strategy for reducing carbon dioxide?
• If the organisation procures steel, do they source from manufacturers that have a strategy for
  reducing carbon dioxide?
• Does the organisation look at environmental issues?