Relationship Between The Barriers And Current Practices Of Sustainable Procurement

Write a report on one important contemporary purchasing and materials management topic that you think will have a major impact in the future.

Topic: Relationship Between The Barriers And Current Practices Of Sustainable Procurement.

Findings of the Research

The sustainable procurement management can be defined by the achieving of the goals or the organizations along with achieving the value of money and maintaining the possibility of the future scopes for betterment of the process ( Brammer and Walker 2016). The sustainable practice will be helpful in doing greater goods of society as well as it will mitigate the damage in the environment. The objective of paper is to evaluate barriers and current practices regarding the sustainable procurement management. This study will find out relationship between barriers and the practices of the procurement management.

There is a discrepancy between the sustainable procurement and political discourse. The paper will discuss the barriers and the findings from the papers will help the society and organizational enterprise for the proper planning of the for the procurement management that will maintain the sustainability.

The homogeneous sample of the procurement management has been collected in order to conduct the findings in this paper. The research is done on the basis of the global competitive market. The data collection tools and the online surveys can be used in this course.

From the findings of the research it can be said that most of the respondents and the managers of the organization thinks that they are following the right sustainable procurement guidelines. Apart from that the rules and regulations regarding the sustainable procurements have been mentioned on the guidebook of the organizations (Oelze et al.2016). However, most of the respondents feel that there is a scope for the improvement of the sustainable procurement practices. Another finding from this research is that most of the organizations do not consider the fact that practice of sustainable procurement can cause a problem for the suppliers of the organization. Another interesting finding from the research is that most of the organizations are unaware about spending the money for the implementation of advanced procurement practice.

Main barriers of sustainable procurement:

One of the main barriers in sustainable procurement practice is the lack of general information regarding the procurement practice. Managers of most of the organizations are stick to the basic practices of procurement management and they are not aware about investing the resources for the further development of the procurement management practice in the organization.

Apart from that in order to maintain the sustainability defining environmental and social criteria is important. However, most of the organizations are unaware about this matter. This can be defined as the lack of using the information in maintaining the sustainability (Barrad, Valverde and Gagnon 2018). Moreover, for most of the organization there are lack of tools and guidelines for maintaining the sustainable procurement. There are guidelines for maintaining the procurements, however, those guidelines does not cover sustainable procurements.

Main Barriers of Sustainable Procurement

Some of the cases, managers of the organization find it difficult to apply sustainable procurement in some of the cases like project life cycle costing.  There is a lack of monitoring in measuring the goals and targets of sustainable procurement management in the organization. Apart from that for the most organizations, there is an absence of sustainability benchmarks.

The barriers in the procurement management describe the issues and the challenges those are present in the practice of the development of sustainable procurement practice in the organization. These barriers can be information barriers, barriers in the tools and infrastructure, politics and supply, demand and resources. In most of the cases it has been seen that the practice of sustainable procurement has been hampered due to the demand, supply and resources. In most cases, the demand or requirements of the product does not have the need of sustainable procurement. Apart from that sustainable resources are not available in the market easily (Stindt 2017).  This makes the sustainable product more expensive than the normal product.  In this case, the allocation of the resource can become a problem. Some of the non-technical stuffs those are responsible to become the challenge such as lack of staffs and lack of technical experts for the implementation of the sustainable procurement management.

There is a relation between the barriers and the sustainable procurement practice. It has been seen that the issues and the challenges in the procurement practice due to the lack of monitoring and proper guidelines can lead the organizations not to focus on the further development of the procurement management process (Young,  Nagpal and Adams 2016). Most of the organizations are unaware about the advanced practice of the procurement management and its implementation in the organization. The situation indicates that there is a need for proper training and guideline for the development of the advanced procurement planning in the organization.

 Apart from that it has been seen that the rank for the resources of category is high, however, there are some differences between the items. This means there are some of the significant gaps between the barriers.

The implementation of the sustainable procurement is a multifaceted issue whose implementation is needed to be categorized in a straightforward way (Ruparathna and Hewage 2015). Supply demand category testifies external issues whereas the other barriers categorized internal issues. This indicates that the developing countries can implement the sustainability requirements can cut off their suppliers in a right way.

Relationship between Barriers and Sustainable Procurement Practice

Some of the people identified themselves as procurement policy makers and some of them identified themselves as procurement practitioners (Thöni and Tjoa 2017). There is a thin difference in the thinking and perspective of the policy makers and practitioners. Policymakers think that sustainable procurement cannot affect the relationship with suppliers.  This reflects the fact that the practitioners works more closely with the suppliers in daily basis (Villena  2018). However, it can be also interpreted that practitioners can also over think regarding the reaction of suppliers. The basic difference in the opinions of the different groups of stakeholders in the project regarding the sustainable procurement indicates that further research is needed to identify the factors regarding the different thinking of the group.

The overall result shows that the approach of the practitioners is more realistic than the project procurement policymakers (Dabhilkar, Bengtsson and Lakemond 2016). From the further research it can be found out that if the policy makers are under estimating some of the measures during the implementation of the sustainable procurement management. Overall, it can be said that there is a remarkable argument between project practitioner and project policy makers.

It can be said from the above discussion that the lack of human resource does not indicate the lack of technical experts in exclusive way (Singh and Trivedi 2016). It also indicates the lack of dedicated staffs. On the other hand “tool” can be defined as cross category for the implementation of the sustainable procurement. It can be said that “tool” is a composite factor that gathers other barriers under its category (Meehan and Bryde 2015). There is a significant correlation between barriers and performance management, tools, demand. The lack of tools makes the organization less supportive regarding the sustainable procurement practice. On the other hand the demand factors are related to the stakeholders of the organization where the sustainable procurement is taking place.

One of the problem factors regarding this matter is the relationship of political factors. It has been seen that the political factors are appeared to be a barrier and it makes sustainable procurement expensive and straining (Ghadimi et al. 2016). This makes the organization to acquire a negative perception for the development of the procurement management. Although the political barrier has the lowest rated in the first part of the analysis.

Conclusion

The discussion is regarding the relationship between barriers and current practices of the sustainable procurement practices in the organization. At the initial part of the discussion, the methodology adopted for the research of the topic. The ratings for different factors are given on the basis of their effects on the practice of the procurement management in the organization. Based on the rating the categorizations of the factors are done. It can be said from the above discussion that there is a relation between the barriers and the current practice of the procurement management.  However, the managers can be more aware regarding the improvement of the existing procurement plan and invest the resources for maintaining sustainability in the procurement plan.

References

Barrad, S., Valverde, R. and Gagnon, S., 2018. The application of system dynamics for a sustainable procurement operation. In Innovative Solutions for Sustainable Supply Chains (pp. 179-196). Springer, Cham.

Brammer, S. and Walker, H., 2016. Sustainable procurement, institutional context and top management commitment: an international public sector study. In Sustainable Value Chain Management (pp. 67-86). Routledge.

Dabhilkar, M., Bengtsson, L. and Lakemond, N., 2016. Sustainable supply management as a purchasing capability: A power and dependence perspective. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 36(1), pp.2-22.

Ghadimi, P., Azadnia, A.H., Heavey, C., Dolgui, A. and Can, B., 2016. A review on the buyer–supplier dyad relationships in sustainable procurement context: past, present and future. International journal of production research, 54(5), pp.1443-1462.

Meehan, J. and Bryde, D.J., 2015. A field-level examination of the adoption of sustainable procurement in the social housing sector. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 35(7), pp.982-1004.

Oelze, N., Hoejmose, S.U., Habisch, A. and Millington, A., 2016. Sustainable development in supply chain management: The role of organizational learning for policy implementation. Business Strategy and the Environment, 25(4), pp.241-260.

Ruparathna, R. and Hewage, K., 2015. Sustainable procurement in the Canadian construction industry: challenges and benefits. Canadian Journal of Civil Engineering, 42(6), pp.417-426.

Singh, A. and Trivedi, A., 2016. Sustainable green supply chain management: trends and current practices. Competitiveness Review, 26(3), pp.265-288.

Stindt, D., 2017. A generic planning approach for sustainable supply chain management-How to integrate concepts and methods to address the issues of sustainability?. Journal of Cleaner Production, 153, pp.146-163.

Thöni, A. and Tjoa, A.M., 2017. Information technology for sustainable supply chain management: a literature survey. Enterprise Information Systems, 11(6), pp.828-858.

Villena, V.H., 2018, July. The Strategic Role of Procurement in Building Sustainable Supply Networks. In Academy of Management Proceedings (Vol. 2018, No. 1, p. 12133). Briarcliff Manor, NY 10510: Academy of Management.

Young, S., Nagpal, S. and Adams, C.A., 2016. Sustainable procurement in Australian and UK universities. Public Management Review, 18(7), pp.993-1016.