As a company, Nielsen has $2.8 billion* of purchasing power, and with power comes responsibility. From ensuring our measurement products are manufactured in factories following ethical business practices to working with diverse-owned businesses, we recognize that we can extend our commitment to good corporate citizenship and sustainability to our supply chain.
Through Nielsen’s Global Procurement organization, we manage the environmental, social, governance (ESG) and ethical impacts of our purchasing. In a recent interview, Crystal Barnes, SVP, Global Responsibility & Sustainability, spoke with Jocelyn Azada, Manager, Supplier Diversity & Sustainability, about how Nielsen’s efforts in this area have evolved since we began the program in 2016.
Building an enterprise-wide program dedicated to building a more sustainable supply chain is no small feat. Jocelyn outlined the process, noting that it starts first with the need to understand a company’s ESG impacts. From there, organizations can look for ways to minimize any negative impacts while increasing positive impacts. Through supplier diversity, for example, companies can increase positive impacts by preferentially allocating their purchasing to innovative women-, minority-, LGBTQ-, and veteran-owned businesses.
“We have [$2.8 billion*] of purchasing power as a company. You can use that purchasing power to make things better, worse, or keep things the same. What supply chain sustainability does is actively choose to make things better,” said Jocelyn.
In the first year of Nielsen’s program, Jocelyn describes how we set out to measure our supply chain sustainability performance. To do so, Nielsen looked at our top 60 suppliers by spend, starting with an assessment of their ESG policies, practices and results. In the second year, we built on this foundation through various initiatives, such as creating our Nielsen Supplier Code of Conduct and drafting RfP (request for proposal) and contracting language to outline our expectations and requirements for suppliers. We’ve also focused on continuous improvement, working together with suppliers where needed to create corrective action plans.
What’s next for supply chain sustainability at Nielsen? We are proud to be a founding member of the Global Impact Sourcing Coalition (GISC), with a goal to increase the adoption of impact sourcing around the world. Impact sourcing has a vision to help end poverty through procurement, whereby companies like Nielsen proactively contract with suppliers who hire people who have otherwise been excluded from the benefits of the global economy.
Visit our Supply Chain Sustainability page on Nielsen.com for more information about our continued investments in this area.
*Updated since filming in December 2017
