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Sustainable procurement – Using AI to make better decisions

As Head of Product Management at Onventis, Dolf van den Boorn is responsible for the digital product portfolio. He has been managing the global product management team at Onventis since 2023. In this role, he leads international product strategy and the continuous development of the source-to-pay product portfolio. Sustainability is an increasingly relevant topic for him – as it is for other experts in the industry. In this interview, he talks about how AI, data, and a new perspective on favourable prices are influencing the topic of sustainability in procurement.

The desire for sustainable purchasing and the goal of saving costs often seem to conflict. Is that true, or can they go hand in hand? If so, how?

Price is just one driving factor within procurement decisions. Buying organisations are also forced to think about environmental spend and a range of ESG topics, so I think the issues go hand in hand. The suppliers that only focus on price are not thinking about the fact that buyers might be willing to pay more to be greener. After all, the cost of a product is more than just the price you pay. Maybe the invoice will be a little bit higher right now, but in the end, it's better for all of us. In the long run, it can even work out cheaper to do it this way, as you can gain a competitive advantage when you choose suppliers who prioritise sustainability instead of those who only focus on price.

Measuring emissions, particularly Scope 3 emissions, is something many companies are focusing on. What’s your experience with the available data?

Tracking emissions, especially Scope 3, is indeed a crucial focus for many companies aiming to understand their environmental impact comprehensively. At Onventis, we’ve developed a tool to calculate emissions using a spend-based approach in combination with supplier-specific emissions data. As we already have all customer spend data available, we are able to calculate emissions using emission factors from suppliers or from external data sources (Ex. Exiabase).

From a broader perspective, the challenges with measuring Scope 3 emissions often stem from the quality, availability, and standardization of data.

Currently, a lot of data is fragmented and can differ at the country level. With our solution, we have the ability to combine data from multiple sources. But for improving the measurement of Scope 3 emissions in wider scale, requires a combination of better data collection, enhanced methodologies, technological innovations, and collaborative efforts.

Sustainable procurement – Using AI to make better decisions
How can sustainable purchasing and the goal of saving costs go hand in hand?

How does AI contribute to promoting sustainable and ethical procurement?

AI plays a significant role at Onventis by promoting sustainable and ethical procurement and enabling organizations to make more informed, efficient, and responsible decisions throughout their supply chain.

For example, in our EcoSpend solution, we use AI to help our customers properly categorize spend from various systems and map the various spend categories from various sources, such as Exiobase and GHG, to the customers’ categories. As a result, emissions are calculated based on automatically categorized spend and emission factors using AI.

Because we do this, a customer gets a good picture of its Scope 3 emissions at both category level and supplier level, making it very easy to monitor targets and flag emission hotspots. This ultimately contributes to making responsible choices and promoting sustainable procurement.

What is Onventis focusing on right now?

EcoSpend is a hot topic for us. We want to support our customers by making Scope 3 emissions visible so they can make more sustainable decisions and ask the right questions of their suppliers.

We’re focusing on how AI can help us automate things and how it can help buyers make better decisions based on historical data and through self-learning mechanisms. It’s about improving productivity and improving decision-making by helping buyers account for personal preferences, previous decisions and other factors so they can make better, more sustainable choices. We can’t ignore the sustainability issue, so it continues to be a large focus for us.

What added value does your network bring?

Users can connect lots of third-party sources to our platform. Onventis connects and absorbs all this information and makes that data available to users so they can make better purchasing choices. Onventis is the central place where everything comes together to assist our buyers’ organisations but also supplier organisations. That's a core part of our vision as being the leading all-in-one procurement platform, connecting buyers and suppliers worldwide.

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