The CIPS Sustainability Index has four key benefits to suppliers

• Having gained a score this can then be provided to a large number of their current and potential customers so avoiding the need to waste time and effort repeating answers to often identical questions.
• It enables suppliers to demonstrate their sustainability credentials to buyers of all sizes and sectors around the world. This provides them a valuable showcase to potentially increase their customer base.
• It allows suppliers to benchmark their sustainability credentials against their industry peers. In turn this helps them identify areas where they may want to improve over time. The CIPS Sustainability Index will give them hints and tips of what best practice organisations do in the areas where they score below average.
• It is cost effective.

• Reduce business risk and enhance business opportunities.
• Enhance brand recognition and reputation.
• Enhance your ability to strategically plan for the longer term.
• Increase long term shareholder returns.
• Improve workforce morale and productivity.
• Improve licence to operate and grow.
• Improve access to lower cost of capital.
• Benchmark your sustainability scores against your competitors.
• Benchmark your sustainability scores against similar sized organisations in different industries.
• Exposure to buying organisations, and potential invitations to competitive bids.
• Measure improvements in your sustainability scores.

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• A robust and comprehensive tool, CIPS Sustainability Index is supported by:
• Sound academic research underpinning the overall design of the index, and developing the question sets and validation scripts.
• Real world solution for real-life application. Validated by industry mentors from the public and private sectors who have critiqued each step of the CIPS Sustainability Index development process to ensure it is fit for purpose in the real world
• Developed, endorsed and supported by CIPS who have played a significant part in ensuring the CIPS Sustainability Index which bears their name is both credible and robust
• A detailed Quality control regime that oversees the audit and verification process ensuring consistency enabling a standard for all.
• PRGX has over 40 years experience delivering robust data and audit related solutions.
• Our knowledge partners such as the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA) who have provided their expert advice and guidance in their specialist field

Having researched all of the sustainability related indices from around the world over a considerable period, we found that many were either: a private sustainability index developed by a buying organisation for their own purposes, therefore detail was not readily available to those outside of the organisation; or they were an index that addressed just one element of the sustainability, such as carbon emissions / energy usage or at social factors in low cost sourcing environments. CIPS Sustainability Index is the only sustainability tool available offering:

• Independence: It is the CIPS UK sustainability index developed to support and encourage best practice in the procurement and supply profession
• Academic underpinning: The CIPS Sustainability Index has been developed in conjunction with the University of the West England (“UWE”) to bring academic rigour to its design, methodology and all of its operational elements
• Reach: The CIPS Sustainability Index enables buyers to obtain a credible view of the sustainability all their suppliers, irrespective of size or sector and enables suppliers to provide their credentials to buyers in a consistent way.
• Breadth: CIPS Sustainability Index is comprehensive – covering all three sustainability pillars – economic, social and environmental
• Benchmarking: The ability for buyers and suppliers to benchmark scores against their industry peers.
• Risk Management: The ability for buying organisations to identify areas of potential risk as a result of suppliers scoring below average in elements of a sustainability pillar that they consider important for their business reputation or continuity.
• Continuous Improvement: The ability for suppliers to identify areas where they are below their industry peers and get on-line advice on what they might consider to effect an improvement..
• Affordability: CIPS Sustainability Index is priced to deliver value to buyers and suppliers at affordable prices

We have benefited from close engagement with a number of Government departments through our Industry Mentor programme which has provided us the opportunity to help us align CIPS Sustainability Index with critical public sector objectives such as efficiency, SME engagement and deficit reduction. In addition we have had strong support from both a leading city council and members of the Southern Universities Purchasing Consortium who see the real value that the CIPS Sustainability Index can bring in their sectors. In addition there is a large cross-over of suppliers from the public into the private sector and vice versa. So it is likely that public sector organisations will find that a large number of their suppliers start to appear on the index having been requested to do so by a private sector buying organisation.