The business benefits of supply chain diversity

Building a mature and sustainable supply chain will enable your organisation to leverage the workforce diversity at your disposal. Making the transition to high diversity performance will address short-term skills shortages and bring long-term sustainability and business growth.

The specific benefits of supplier diversity include:

• Compliance with government and/or client directives
• Improved levels of customer and community satisfaction, including those from protected groups
• Increased market share
• Enhanced supply chain processes and performance
• Greater agility and flexibility in the supply chain
• Boosts to innovation, creativity and problem-solving
• More effective supplier competition and sourcing
• Stronger local economies.

Developing a supplier diversity programme with EW Group

There are a number of ways we can help you to embed diversity best practice in your supply chain:

• Supplier diversity certification through the Diversity in Business Accreditation
• Diversity diagnostics and target-setting
• Supply chain diversity training and e-learning
• Recommendations on how to support and manage supplier diversity performance
• Recommendations for future data gathering, monitoring and evaluation.

Best practices in action – the EW Group approach to supplier diversity

All EW Group programmes focus on supporting organisations to develop and measure the positive impact of engaging with supplier diversity. Our consultants have extensive skills in identifying and presenting existing good practice in your supply chain. This will enable your organisation to build on what already works well. This is critical if your company is to stand out as a high-performing supply chain administrator and fair employer.

Our consultants will support you in delivering best practice in the following areas of supplier diversity:

• Presenting a compelling business case for supply chain diversity
• Being a responsible procurer
• Addressing unconscious bias in decision making
• Understanding the implications of the Social Value Act 2012 on procurement and commissioning
• Promoting good relations with diverse suppliers
• Maximising your influence
• Signposting to relevant resources (on the Equality Act 2010 and the Public Sector Equality Duty, for example).

Supply chain diversity diagnostics

As specialists in diversity data analysis, we are in prime position to assess your current state on diversity. We’ll look at how much data is there, and how much understanding there is of the benefits and the business case. This benchmarking will inform the KPIs and metrics of the project, which we will design in collaboration with you to ensure they complement your company values and vision.

We’ll delve into your talent pipeline from end to end, identifying any skills gaps. We can support you in developing supplier diversity questionnaires and policy statements. And we’ll explore the ways in which your organisation can progress to be best-in-class and an exemplar to your industry.

Here are some of our key considerations during our quantitative and qualitative data analysis:

• How can you position supply chain diversity targets as a positive rather than an additional burden?
• How can the contracts or strategic plans you already have in place be adapted to include these diversity targets?
• Can flexibility work for your suppliers, given their different tiers, sizes and demographics?
• How can you dovetail your new supplier diversity targets with your existing concerns (e.g. health and safety)?
• How can target-setting contribute to building supplier diversity?
• How can it be linked to boosting the local economy of a given area?
• How can the largest suppliers be encouraged to contribute to supply chain diversity?
• How can these larger suppliers support SMEs and contribute to a partnership approach?
• How can you ensure long-term impact and sustainability?