As a global and responsible company, Atos Origin is committed to implement sustainable best practices (environmental, social, ethical areas) throughout its organization and in its business, and contributes to promoting and developing sustainable behaviour by positively influencing its stakeholders to take into consideration sustainability in their decision making and business.
In 2008 we began a partnership with Ecovadis, a specialist in sustainable purchasing solutions, to assess our own procurement policy and whether it takes into account environmental and social responsibility in choosing our suppliers. As of May 2009, this code, which covers the scope of the United Nations’ Global Compact, has been appended to every new contract. A full global policy is being introduced in 2010 and the current partnership with Ecovadis runs until 2012.
Our Global Sustainable Purchasing Policy addresses all purchasing categories. This policy incorporates sustainable considerations at all stages of the purchasing and decision making process. Our Purchasing Charter includes environmental and social requirements and suppliers now have to commit to the sustainable principles promoted in the Charter which is appended to new contracts.
Responsible purchasing also involves raising purchasers' awareness (100% of our purchasers were trained in 2009), measuring suppliers' environmental and social performance, implementing sustainable selection criteria and monitoring specific indicators.
Our policy integrates sustainable development as a criterion to choose our suppliers. Here our objective is to give an average weighting of 10% to this factor. In this connexion, with the assistance of Ecovadis, each year we assess the societal and environmental performance of a large part of our providers (equivalent to 35% of our total expenditures in 2009).
This sustainable supply management brings together the principles of supply management and corporate social responsibility to make suppliers a sustainable source of value. One of the objectives is to better mitigate our supply chain risks while positively influencing our suppliers in innovating products and implementing best practices.