Supply Chain – Annual Update Blog

I coach my nephew’s little league team here in Texas. What impresses me most about these young players is the enthusiasm that they have for being a part of a team. While they care about their individual performance, they care more about the team. At a young age, they fundamentally understand that they rise and fall together.

This spirit of teamwork is something I think we all can learn from.

At my day job, one of my responsibilities is supporting the sustainability efforts of our supply chain team. Like the little league team, we must understand that we do not operate in a silo and that to successfully achieve our sustainability goals, we must collaborate with our suppliers.

Recently, we issued our 2013 Annual Sustainability Update, which features some of the progress we’re making in engaging with our suppliers. Two of the goals we’re specifically working toward are to have the majority of our spend with strategic suppliers be with those who track greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and have specific GHG goals for the end of 2015, and for our top suppliers to achieve an average score of 80 percent or higher on the balanced C&S Scorecard by the end of 2017.

Some 2013 highlights of our progress on those goals include:

• Suppliers representing more than 50 percent of AT&T’s spend reported that they were tracking greenhouse gas emissions and had greenhouse gas reduction goals.
• The average score for top suppliers on our sustainability scorecard was more than 63 percent. The scorecard – which covers topics including health and safety, energy efficiency, greenhouse gas emissions, hazardous substances, human rights, labor practices and water –  represents about 80 percent of our annual spend.
• We continued to train our contract managers, more than 200 sourcing professionals, about sustainability in the supply chain and are providing the tools necessary to engage our strategic suppliers on sustainable business practices. As a result we are seeing greater awareness and participation by our suppliers.  
• Six suppliers received AT&T’s Sustainability Supplier Award for their work to help us advance our commitment in the areas of alternative energy, energy efficiency, process improvement, the environment and packaging.

This year, we will continue to collaborate with our suppliers and team together to tackle key environmental and social challenges.