Ethics in procurement consist of a wide based set of values (or ethics code) that govern the Procurement Process for both the buyer and suppler base, ensuring professionalism and integrity for all concerned parties.
These Ethical values would provide for critical considerations such as expectations, vendor and internal stakeholder relationships, social responsibility, environmental, supply and quality resolution, escalations, and legal implications.
Ethical Challenges to Procurement faced by team leaders, needing to be included in any Ethics Code would include the very obvious such as political circumstances (sanctions, embargoes etc), bribery and corruption, nepotism, kickbacks, but of course there are several not so blatant but equally important values that can be influential, such BEE and gender based ownership, religious and or cultural norms, by way of many subtle and often not referred to examples.
Naturally, these values would vary, accordingly for each individual company and political environment in which they operate, and thus influences the business relationship between buyer and supplier.
For any chance of a Procurements Ethics Policy to succeed, it needs to be “zero tolerance” orientated, benchmarked, formalised and put into writing, clearly stating expectations, obligations, and recourses for both sides of the Procurement Supply Chain, tactically reinforced by regular auditing and training of both staff and management. That Ethics Code should also play a pivotal guiding role in the Onboarding Process of any new supplier , and the review process of existing ones. It is equally important to acknowledge and reward your suppliers for implementing good ethical practice. This can be achieved thru ‘preferred supplier’ status or other reward programmes which direct orders towards better-performing suppliers.
However, it is amazing how little, if any training and review occurs in most to all companies, irrespective of size, regards Ethics Codes, often with long term repercussions.
It is however critical that all relative company members that are party to the Procurement Process understand, refer to and implement these codes in their dealings.
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