Episode 80 - Does ISO 20400 work in a global context? - Carsten Hansen

Carsten Hansen is a former Chief of Global Procurement for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). He shares his experience in applying ISO 20400 globally in his former role and in his current position as a high level advisor.

For more information go to https://www.iso20400.org/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Hello everybody and welcome to our podcast series on sustainable procurement. I'm Sean McCarthy, Director of Action Sustainability Community Interest Company, and this current podcast series is about ISO 2400 and understanding how it works in the real world. And I'm delighted to welcome today, Carsten Henson. Welcome. Thank you, Sean. So, Carsten, can you first of all introduce yourself and tell us who you are, what you do, your background a little bit, how you became involved in sustainable procurement?

SPEAKER_01 0:48

Sure, thank you. No, absolutely. I started my um procurement journey uh back in 2001 when I joined the UN system and uh started out in Somalia, uh implementing UN development projects, uh mostly on the operational side, and then migrating into more concrete procurement. Um, a great introduction to procurement, high focus on risk management. We did a lot of construction work in Somalia during the time, very complex environment. So that was a great learning experience and really got me hooked on the procurement side. I'll admit I did start on the program side, which in the UN system means you know we bring the proposals together, etc. But I quickly realized in order to get anything done, you needed to go to procurement. So I quickly realized I wanted to be part of that team because they were the ones getting things done. So that was my introduction to procurement. I then ended up as the head of the supply chain division at UNRWA in Lebanon, also a UN agency supporting 15 refugee camps in Lebanon, and then migrated on to New York as the global procurement advisor for the UNDP, the United Nations Development Program. Migrated a little bit back and forth between Bangkok and New York for a couple of years, and then ultimately ended as the chief of global procurement and contracting for the UNDP. And this was a great opportunity to also look at sustainability. So, as a UN agency, of course, we have a very clear development mandate in UNDP, and the opportunity for leveraging procurement to align that with the organizational objectives of UNDP was very obvious. So, of course, started working on the sustainability agenda. How could we integrate this more effectively? We were buying $3 billion worth of procurement across 174 countries in the world. So the impact, particularly in the locations where we were, were immense and had really a large potential. In that role, and as that process matured, I became the co-chair of the UN systems. We have what we call a high-level management committee in what we call the procurement network, where all the UN agencies and some of the IFIs come together and we coordinate our procurement. And in this space, we have a working group on sustainable procurement. And this is really where we wanted to walk the talk. So for the UN system itself to implement sustainability practices into our procurement, similar to what the UN system was asking governments to do. So this was a great opportunity to really come together. All the UN agencies align practices, send one market signal from all the UN, particularly in the specific locations where we operate. So that was a great opportunity and a good introduction to both the sustainability opportunities but also the challenges in terms of organizational implementation. I can just mention I have since left the UN system for the last three years. I have been working independently. I am the director of a sustainable public procurement accelerator lab. It's a bit long to say, so we call it the SPP Lab. It's based at a business school here at a university in Toronto, a York University. And here we work with governments and organizations on how to accelerate sustainable public procurement implementation. And then I work as a consultant mostly with governments, MDBs, UN system across the world. Thank you, Sean. Thank you for having me.

SPEAKER_00 4:36

Brilliant. Thanks very much. That's a fantastic introduction and a fascinating range of experience. Before we move on to talk about the standard, I mean I'm really interested in your uh experience, obviously in procuring on behalf of various different parts of the world. And even, you know, you mentioned Somalia and Lebanon as places that you've worked. I've always maintained that sustainability is quite contextual. And what sustainability means to countries like that, I suspect is very different to what it means to countries in the EU or the UK or whatever. How do you see that context playing out?

SPEAKER_01 5:15

At that time, it wasn't a big part of the agenda. But in hindsight, I see sustainability as an opportunity to become more efficient. And efficiency matters in those contexts. Efficiency in terms of fuel consumption, in terms of material use, etc. So here I see sustainability playing an equally important role in those contexts. If you can recycle construction material in the context of a place like Somalia or Lebanon, you have less that you need to import. It brings down the overall costs. There's lots of benefits. I can mention that, for instance, in terms of just pure sustainability, we had solarized a lot of hospitals in Somalia. So there's no power grid. The solarization of these hospitals, the operation of the hospital itself, but equally important, it was able to bring electricity out to the local community. So the excess electricity could go out to the community, support the lighting of markets, other activities, etc., which really meant that you could support the local community and the local economic development in that area. So in that sense, sustainability, you can kind of say you can leapfrog a lot of infrastructure development by implementing sustainability in that particular context.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

Yeah, and provide social and economic benefit, as you mentioned, to the community. It kind of brings that example that you quoted, just kind of brings in all three pillars of sustainability straight away. And yes, as you say, if if you have no electricity supply, you you wouldn't build a coal-fired power station these days, would you? You would you put in something as a as a renewable source. So uh tell us about ISO 2400. I understand that you have some experience of uh of using it, particularly with your clients and governments around the world. Um, what what drives people to use the standard?

SPEAKER_01 7:13

No, thank you. I think the first real application of the ISO 2040 was in the context of the UN system itself. So I was, as mentioned, the chief of global procurement and contracting for UNDP. We bought 3 billion of goods, services, construction around 174 countries around the world. We had 650 buyers in all these locations, and we had the most obvious and clear mandate on the planet to go out and implement sustainable procurement. And yet it was hard. Uh, it wasn't easy. We had a very clear executive mandate. Um, our administrator and administrator, sorry, at the time, was the former uh minister of environment from Germany, the former head of UNEP. So he came in, of course, with a very clear mandate around sustainability. Uh, we had our 650 buyers around the world who were all aligned with the SDG 2030 agenda. Uh they were committed. So it wasn't the mandate that was the issue. So looking at what we had in place, we had some policy framework in place. Uh, the question was: why was it so difficult? Why was it so challenging to implement sustainable procurement under what I would say would be the ideal circumstances? So I actually did a bit of research and wrote an article called Waking the Trillion Dollar Giant back in 2020. And it was basically a desk review to identify what are the challenges, what are the barriers, what are the required enablers for implementing sustainable public procurement effectively. And the research showed that policy is, of course, the foundational piece. We are usually custodians of taxpayers' money, we need to make sure we have policy aligned, um, well governed, etc. But it is obviously only one dimension of the many that needs to be in place. And uh one dimension, of course, that we realized was missing or was we struggled with was the technical piece. So each category that we bought, and in UNDP at the time we bought 1,017 unique categories, uh represent a universe of technical requirements from a sustainability perspective. You really need to be an expert in every single one of them. And when you have a typical sort of public procurement setup where you have business units around the world with three to four, maybe if they're lucky, procurement people, that expertise is very difficult to obtain and retain. So we couldn't really go out and train everybody in in all these uh different categories becoming experts. So we needed a tool that allowed us to prioritize, uh, get the best return of investment, and really to um to organize that. The other aspect, of course, given the context as well in which we operate, was the market. We don't do procurement in isolation. So, what was the market ability to respond? What was the market readiness? We needed a tool to understand that, how to engage with suppliers and how to work with them in in some locations like Somalia, where this may not be a big priority, and other places in Eastern Europe where we were also doing construction work, where this was much more on the agenda. So that diverse context as well was important. And then finally, we identified another dimension, which was about organizational change, organizational culture, aligning incentives across the organization to implement effectively. Because frankly, for an average procurement person, implementing sustainability really has no upside from a risk perspective, right? It's more challenging, it takes more time, the business is pushing for you to deliver, lead time is a key issue, you have a higher risk of having a failed procurement process, getting supplier protest in the public procurement space, which all leads to a failed procurement. So there was very little upside for the procurement people to actually implement sustainability. And what we found there was a part of sort of champions who were leading this, but getting it sort of together as an organizational alignment where you integrate sustainability KPIs into the procurement department's operations, and then trickling that down to the team leaders, to the individual procurement practitioners in their performance evaluations, that's when you get that implementation momentum and organizational alignment. And then, of course, in the very center of these four dimensions of policy, organizational change, capacity, and market, we were looking at the cost, sustainable public procurement cost. So the perception was if you buy sustainable products and goods and services, then it would be more costly. And that's sort of a non-starter in many of the locations where we were operating and really a concrete barrier that we needed to overcome. So looking at that analysis and then finding the ISO 20,400 framework, which is very clear on how you build and address all those elements into your implementation plan, was very helpful. So, and I think because of the ISO credibility as well, going to your organization with an ISO aligned strategy was very powerful. And because the ISO 2040 is so well developed and so practical in terms of how you cascade the implementation from the multiple levels, I found that to be very helpful. So we used the ISO 2040 in the context of the UN system for the organizations that we implemented for. I have since used it with governments, I've used it with private sector companies, and this is a very powerful tool because of its logic and practical application.

SPEAKER_00 13:04

That's brilliant. Thank you. I think it's um, as I said, uh sometimes people don't quite understand what ISO 2400 does, you and your clients obviously do, because it is very much a strategic framework rather than a uh a tick box about products, and people are always asking me why why can't I just have a list of products that are sustainable? And unfortunately, it's it's not as simple as that. Um how was the the response? I mean, you you talked about kind of cascading this all the way down through the hierarchy of procurement people and 600 odd procurement people around the world, all presumably from different backgrounds, different cultures, speak different languages, etc. What was the response like when you were implementing the standard?

SPEAKER_01 13:48

So the cascading works really well in terms of how you brief and engage different parts of an organization. So this starting point where you have an executive entry point at the organizational commitment level, uh, you address the right people, you link it strategically to their sustainability ambitions, how it ties into. Let's say I worked with that with a big bank that was implementing sustainable procurement. What was the value for the bank? The value was that this tied into the MSCI ratings as a company. So that strategic linkage was important for that particular organization at the executive level. Then the next level was sort of the departmental level, where the team lead was required to implement this, see it as part of their bigger planning. And that allowed us to engage that middle management level. And then the actual practitioner engagement, we had like a one-week workshop where we went through the prioritization of their portfolio and then dipped deep, deep dives into those particular categories, which they identified as being most critical for them in terms of value and risk. And that multiple sort of level of engagement was very helpful.

SPEAKER_00 15:02

Yeah, thank you. This is all music to my ears. It's exactly what we wanted people to do when we uh when we created the standard. Um, uh you've mentioned a couple of things, what I would call drivers, you know, reasons to do it, and that there's the whole uh kind of driver's model in the standard that gives you some examples of of reasons why you should do it, and also the the setting priorities, uh and you know, setting the priorities by by category. Are there any other specific aspects of the standard that you you think work well for you?

SPEAKER_01 15:33

I think the risk management perspective, I think sustainable public procurement is well presented as part of a risk management process. It resonates well with all organizations to manage their risks, of course. Um, but it is extremely helpful to, uh, in my view, to do the prioritization. As I mentioned, UNDP's 1017 unique categories. Uh where do you start and how can you justify the level of effort for an organization to so I actually developed a what we call the sustainability-weighted procurement portfolio model, which is the two-dimensional matrix of sustainability risks versus value. And this applies really well to every organization because you get a unique company organizational snapshot of what are the key categories where you get the highest return of investment. I believe for UNDP for the top 10 categories, we were able to cover 40 to 50 percent of their annual spend, which is a very strong message. For the latest client that we worked with, the top five plus seven high value categories represented 78% of their spend. So that's very pareto aligned and was a great messaging, right? They could communicate that about 80% of their procurement volume uh was under sustainability guidelines. Very powerful messaging and a great way of communicating how risk management uh supports the organization and it it tidies it up and makes it very targeted. So that risk management perspective inherent in the ISO 2040, I think is very powerful and one that we've used a lot.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

Yeah, thank you. That that's interesting as well, because we had a great debate when we were developing the standard. Um, and you'll notice that whenever the word risk appears, there's always and opportunities. Because I think some earlier versions of the standard were a bit negative. You know, if it's always about risk and you know, preventing bad things from happening, we we tried to get a balance to say, well, actually, there could be some benefits as well, uh, and some things, and which you've already mentioned, uh, some benefits of things that you've uh that you've done in the past.

SPEAKER_01 17:51

That's actually a really good one, John. I just mentioned that. That's actually what we did. We didn't perceive it as a risk, but a risk slash opportunity, exactly to your point.

SPEAKER_00 18:00

Oh, that's great, yeah. Yeah, because again, you you can have a yeah, we used to have a sort of red amber green on the uh the two-dimensional matrix, and then then we invented a blue or something to say, well, actually, this is an opportunity. This is something that you might, it's not a red risk, it's a big blue opportunity. So uh again, it's it's about having that flexibility, isn't it, to be able to uh to use the standard in the way you see fit. I uh get involved in all sorts of debates with people about the the fact that the standard is a guidance standard and not a requirement standard. So therefore, you you can't you know get a pass fail audit and get a certificate on the wall and a ticket in the box. And some people prefer the guidance standard with its flexibility and its ability to really look into some of the problems. But I do get questions always about when is ISO 2400 going to grow up and be a proper standard that I can get an audit and a certificate against. Um, where are you in in this discussion?

SPEAKER_01 19:04

I think initially it's helpful with the guidance to help organizations assess where they sit and what is required and get comfortable with the with the framework and and what sustainability can do for them on the procurement side. Having said that, I think it would be useful now to start migrating into a sort of ISO certification framework, which is pass and fail in a way, because I think having sustainability audits is actually quite helpful. Most people dread the audits, but those of us who are trying to push for change audits can be very helpful because audit recommendation, audit findings get the attention of the executive. And if we could get to the point where sustainability is part of a procurement audit, just like a value for money audit or a compliance audit, equally, you have a sustainability audit. This would put the sustainability more firmly on the agenda for the executive level. So we've seen this happen. We've seen sustainability recommendations on the procurement side identified, and that sort of trigger a high interest and support, which comes with resources that allows you to more effectively implement. So I would say migrating towards a sort of certification standard that would be very powerful and helpful.

SPEAKER_00 20:29

Yeah, it's interesting. It seems in the ISO system it is possible to have both. So you can actually start off with a requirement standard that's more flexible and then move on to uh to a more auditable standard. Because I certainly a lot of the questions, and I'm sure you'd have a view on this, a lot of the people that want a certificate tend to be more from the developing world, and it it seems to be such an issue in in Africa or in some cases the Indian subcontinent, where a certificate is really important.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

I can imagine, but I do think also that many companies are concerned with their both internal and external audits. The minute that you include anything in the policy framework, uh, put KPIs together, they will be audited. And that means a firm commitment and so on. So the idea of introducing a guideline first to make sure that you're comfortable, you can self-assess. And then once you feel you're there, where you would like to actually use the certification, maybe for uh for the point of meeting certain requirements from certain buyers, etc., then you could you could take that step. So if ISO allows both, I think it's it would be useful.

SPEAKER_00 21:45

Yeah, I think it's a possibility. It's certainly something that we we should be exploring uh as part of the review of the standard. If you were to turn it around the other way and look at the standard with a critical eye, what is it you don't like about the standard? What could potentially be improved?

SPEAKER_01 22:00

Look, I think the the standard is very comprehensive, it touches upon everything. You can do a lot of different things with it depending on how you weight it. I mentioned risk management, that could be your entry point, the sort of capacity building could be your. Entry point. So you can do a lot with the existing framework. It's not really weighted in that sense. But one thing that I have noticed is an increasing demand for measurable impact. So more practical guidelines on how you can showcase the value proposition of sustainable procurement. In every organization, in every government, in every company, this is increasingly a requirement. So the guidelines are good, it's about implementation. And I of course recognize that there is a lot of reference to measuring and improving performance already embedded in the current standard. But where we really see the issue is when it comes to implementation of life cycle costing into evaluation of bids. How can you effectively look at carbon reduction as an evaluation criteria? We need to be more confident in our evaluation methodologies. And the procurement people, particularly in public procurement, need to be very confident in order for them to use it. Otherwise, they will be likely targets, you know, for supplier protests or internal pushback, etc. So I think this is where maybe it's not an ISO 20,400 guideline requirement, but maybe a sort of annex or the next step, uh, really focusing in on that would be important. Sustainable procurement has been under, I wouldn't say attack, but there's been a lot of pushback in terms of uh what is the value for money proposition from it and how do we measure it. Um, so empowering and giving our champions that tool to showcase what value it has provided is really important. So, lifecycle costing is for me the most obvious. Many procurement entities are still looking at comparing purchasing price, maybe a little bit of total cost of ownership, but that sort of lifecycle costing and monetarization of carbon into the bit analysis for me is critical. And we have done a lot of these LCC analyses for government counterparts, we've compared some of their procurements, and it's really eye-opening what comes up. Like we had a scenario where we had uh two equal computers, 14-inch black laptops, both on framework agreements, both tagged as sustainable. But when we did the life cycle costing on them, one was 60 times more efficient given the nature of the um of the processor. So, in terms of life cycle costing on energy use, one laptop versus the other was much more energy efficient. And if you don't measure that, if you're not looking for that component, then you're not going to catch that efficiency opportunity. And indirectly, this was only related to sustainability, right? But it was more a cost issue. We also did some life cycle costing on the procurement of EVs for some governments where they were very happy with their EV procurement, they had got these EVs into their fleet, and on paper and intuitively, it seemed like it was a very um good sustainability move. However, when we started doing the life cycle costing and looking at the emission factor of the scope 2 electricity that they were charging these with overnight, it ended up being a 215% higher emission cost than driving a normal combustion engine because of the nature of the electricity on the grid. Just showcasing that you really need to take a holistic view on your sustainability efforts.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

That's an amazing. I'm just blown away by that previous example about laptops. So one laptop was 66 zero times more efficient than another laptop that were both just linked to the link to the processor, yeah, speed and capacity.

SPEAKER_01 26:33

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 26:34

Yeah, because you you just think a laptop, you know, it's it's a laptop. What's the difference? That's astonishing. It really is, and I think a very good message for our listeners to say you need to look at these things and really understand them. And you know, just because they've got a label that says this is a sustainable thing, um uh look at it in a bit more detail. That's incredible. You say you've obviously a lot of your workers have been in sustainable public procurement, and you've mentioned things like you know, challenges from suppliers and that sort of thing, which tend to tend to be on the radar of public procureurs all the time and not so much an issue for the private sector. How do you how do you compare and contrast private versus public when we think about sustainable procurement?

SPEAKER_01 27:17

I think the private sector is much more ahead than public procurement, ironically. But I think that's because they have seen and embraced the value proposition of sustainable procurement. I think approaching sustainability in procurement from a business efficiency perspective adds a lot of value. If you can showcase the cost savings from supply chain optimization, from energy use, from uh resilience on your energy consumption, etc., you're really making a business case uh to your shareholders in the company. And this this resonates. I think from public procurement, we are more approaching it from we should do this because it's good for the planet and we have emission reduction targets as a country, but the actual cost benefit is not so well articulated. And I think this this is the weakness in the public procurement space. Just last week we were doing workshops with suppliers, and uh the the task here was to get the suppliers, they were customers of a bank, and the bank required them to be more sustainable, have sustainability reporting, to access green finance opportunities. And uh they were SMEs, so for them it wasn't quite clear why they needed to do this. It there's very little margin as an SME, right? And time for them is definitely a constraint. But what we did was we spent uh one day with them having a workshop showcasing very quickly what is the business value proposition from reducing your energy consumption, managing your water exposure, what are the climate risks that are coming in and how can they be tackled? Uh, even looking at the social side, human capital issues, uh, liabilities, uh all these aspects we turned into business benefits and efficiencies, clearly stating that sustainable business was good business. And that resonated. And after that one-day workshop, they were able to go through these 15 sustainability indicators, prioritize which were most important for them, most material, set benchmarks using open source free tools available online, and basically print out a sustainability roadmap after just one day, which would be implemented over five years. And I think that really opened my eyes for how effective and efficient it is when you can showcase the business value proposition. And in public procurement, we just need to become better at that. So we can go to the Ministry of Finance and say, if you use recycled asphalt uh for this road construction project, this is how much you would save over time. Because it is their mandate to make sure that the budget dallies and that we're getting value for money. So sustainability should not be perceived as an additional cost, but a value-adding fiscal instrument to reduce uh cost and enhance efficiency of public spending.

SPEAKER_00 30:30

Yeah, thank you. I I've always used the phrase if if sustainable procurement is costing you more, you're probably doing it wrong because it is about delivering value, isn't it? So one of the things that I've experienced, certainly on the uh the ISO 2400 committee and also in some of my former consultancy work, certainly uh a lot of delegations from South America very concerned about corruption in public procurement. Um, and also Eastern Europe, uh, particularly you know, former Soviet bloc countries that were very, very reluctant to do anything that might be a little bit creative around looking at sustainability or looking at things that couldn't be very clearly identified in black and white uh as being issues because clearly that you know there is a history of corruption in some public procurement agencies, and everybody wants to make sure that they're they're seen to be doing absolutely the right thing and not arousing suspicion of potential corruption. Um is that something that you've I know it's a touchy subject, but is is that something that you found in your career? Not the actual corruption, but the uh you know the but the the attitude uh and the processes of people.

SPEAKER_01 31:50

I think it's a very real issue, and I think we should not be naive about this issue when we pursue sustainability in public procurement, especially. Anything that is not clear-cut, that is not quantifiable, that cannot be assessed equally, would open up uh possible uh corruption or allegation of corruption, uh equally consequential either way. And therefore, we need to be much better at our evaluation methodologies when we set sustainability criteria. They need to be clear-cut, black and white, objective, third-party verifiable, auditable, defensible for exactly that reason. So this is really a challenge back to us as sustainability practitioners in making sure that none of these criteria that we introduce as being sustainable are subjective, but there's a clear, quantifiable evidence associated with whether that criteria has been met or not.

SPEAKER_00 32:48

Yeah, thank you. That's a really good point. And certainly I found in my long history in sustainable procurement, and things are changing now, the way that procurement people think and act compared to the way that sustainability people think and act was very different. And certainly in the early days, uh I was getting a lot of very abstract concepts from our colleagues in environment departments, and and they I couldn't understand them very well, and they couldn't understand me to say, well, actually, what I work with is exactly what you say: contracts, KPIs, real things written down that can actually be delivered. And and sometimes it is quite hard to bring some of the particularly some of the social concepts and social values through procurement to turn that into something that's real and tangible. And I I guess for all of us that's probably still a work in progress. It's hard to do. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 33:43

But to your point, Sean, I think it's so important that the procurement function itself defines the sustainability space from a public procurement or procurement mindset. I think for a long time the sustainability agenda was pushed by sustainability experts, not functional experts in procurement. And I think uh it's much more powerful when it's sort of a bottom-up approach from procurement itself. And this is again where the ISO 22400 is so useful, exactly when it says build on existing business processes. I think this is one of the most powerful things. We don't want to make sustainability an additional process, uh, a silo, an add-on. This needs to be integrated into how we do procurement already, because that's a meaningful structure, and if it doesn't fit because we can't quantify it, then we need to revisit that and identify how you can do that and to be effective. So, again, the ISO 20,400 framework, linking it to existing business processes is the way forward. Ideally, in 10 years from now, we wouldn't be talking about sustainable procurement as an isolated phenomenon, right? It should be integrated into mainstream procurement. This is just how we do procurement, just like we don't look at quality assurance as a standalone procurement issue. No, it's part of what we do. So that is my hope that we will have more sort of bottom-up procurement embedded sustainability frameworks coming up that better match how we do business.

SPEAKER_00 35:13

Yeah, absolutely, because procurement, as you say, is such a powerful agent of change if it's done well. Uh, and that leverage through the supply chain is, you know, it's criminal to uh to not use it. And I remember again actually going back way before ISO 2400 on the original UK Sustainable Procurement Task Force. Jonathan Corritt was part of the task force, very well-known uh sustainability guru around the world. And he said something that really resonated, he says lots that really resonate with me, but one of the things he said on the committee was the public sector does not have the right to procure unsustainably. What gives you the right to do that on our behalf? And I thought, wow, yeah. Um, that's a really good thought to uh to take away. How do you translate that into actual real tangible actions is is another matter, but it's a very good principle, I thought, to start with.

SPEAKER_01 36:08

But I heard the same comment uh just last week. We did a big workshop uh in Kuwait for the uh public procurement space. We had all the ministries there and uh making the case and that sustainable public procurement would be an enabler and a platform for accelerating what we have as Vision 2035. And here, public procurement, what they're buying, can really help them achieve that vision. Globally, it's a $13 trillion giant, by the way, right? So we really need to leverage it on the demand side. But one of the comments that came was yes, but if public procurement goes out and just uses the minimum mandatory requirements, they're actually undermining sustainability implementation because they're rewarding the companies who are doing it the absolute cheapest, who have not taken those steps. And here I think, yes, when we have less mature markets, we could have a mandatory minimum requirement to make sure that it's inclusive, but then at least put in weighted scoring, allowing to reward companies who have made that extra step, who are able to take those uh extra or those extra miles to reward them, because otherwise you will not have that investment happening. So I think that's a really good point.

SPEAKER_00 37:26

So, Carlson, final question for you. What would your advice be to somebody coming newly into sustainable procurement? A lot of people in our audience are people who have been given the job of sustainable procurement and they're not quite sure where to start. What advice would you give them?

SPEAKER_01 37:43

Well, I would say you need to start in procurement. And as we we discussed, I think that any meaningful sustainable procurement efforts need to be embedded in the core function of procurement itself. So I think it would not be the right mindset to say, let me get into sustainable procurement. No, understand the function, become uh the best procurement person you can be, so you have the credibility and the full understanding of how that function works, and then integrate sustainability into your practices where and when you can. For me, that would be my advice to that person. Get a core understanding, confidence in the in the function itself, and then from that perspective and that position, use that as a platform for integrating sustainability. Then it becomes more meaningful as we discussed because you're building on existing business practices.

SPEAKER_00 38:40

Yeah, part of how we do procurement, the point that you made earlier. Carsten, that was fantastic. Thank you very much. I'm sure our audience are going to uh to really enjoy that discussion. And for somebody of your experience that uh takes the time out to share your thoughts, we're very, very grateful. Um, thank you for your your time and sharing your experience. Thank you, Sean. Thanks for having me.