The nature of our business and our market creates a mutual dependency between O2 and its key suppliers.
The cost and complexity of technology makes it important to create and nurture long-term supplier relationships. We therefore aim to make these relationships as valuable to both parties as we can and seek to manage this through our ‘supplier relationship management’ programme.
In practice, we aim to minimise traditional supply-chain problems and inefficiencies, to optimise our suppliers’ value in the supply chain, and to co-ordinate and align our management strategies with theirs.
We engage with suppliers and adopt a pragmatic approach so that we can achieve maximum benefit for both parties within a framework of clear corporate responsibility.
Our key objectives are to:
To ensure our supply chain meets all the criteria we set for ourselves, we regularly carry out audits of suppliers.
The scope of our audit generally includes a capability assessment, a review of the management systems a supplier has in place to control its operations, an understanding of how it assures the quality of its products and services, and also seeks to match up our own ethical and environmental procurement policies with our suppliers’ own working practices. This includes their own labour, environmental and business ethics practices and those of other suppliers in their supply chain.
The suppliers' responses to our self-assessment questionnaire form the basis of any audit and provides the data we need to explore their policies, procedures and practices.
Before we visit a supplier to carry out a full audit, we will have already gained first-hand knowledge of a supplier’s working practices, an understanding of the supplier base, its geographical distribution and the type of products and services procured.
In respect of labour and environmental practices, the most common finding so far is the lack of formal policies and procedures suppliers have to manage these same issues within their own extended supply chain. Creating awareness and capability throughout the supply chain is therefore a key objective of not only O2 but the industry as a whole.
