Accelerating Your Journey Towards a Sustainable Supply Chain
Delivering on your organisation's sustainable procurement ambitions
17th June 2025
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More than 60% of organisations plan to increase their focus on sustainable sourcing, driven by an increasingly complex web of global compliance requirements, rising investor pressure, and increasing consumer demand for sustainable supply chains.
How confident are you in your organisation’s overall readiness to deliver on its sustainable procurement ambitions?
The reality is that most procurement and sustainability leaders are operating without a clear baseline and face significant hurdles to improve responsible sourcing effectively.
Cost pressures remain a top concern, with 83% of procurement professionals identifying inflationary pressures and rising commodity prices as their primary external challenge. Resource constraints are also a barrier: organisations cite a lack of internal capacity and specialised sustainability expertise as one of the most critical factors slowing progress.
Misalignment across departments and lack of C-suite buy-in, on the other hand, hinder strategic alignment and effective decision-making, often due to siloed communication and unclear requirements. Meanwhile, Limited supplier visibility and fragmented supply chain data poses risks, with only 60% of companies having comprehensive visibility into their tier-one suppliers, and even fewer beyond that.
These challenges can make the journey to supply chain transformation difficult and potentially costly. However, by establishing a comprehensive baseline, you can better measure progress and benchmarks, more clearly communicate successes and needs, make more effective and efficient decisions, and produce stronger outcomes.
Where to Begin
The potential gaps and key opportunities within your procurement programme are a good place to start a supply chain transformation journey. With the many pillars that make up a successful sustainable supply chain programme, it is important to know the areas that should be prioritised so that you can build upon the existing foundation strategically and confidently.
As you begin to better structure your procurement programme, it’s also important to measure your supply chain’s performance against key metrics for efficiency and sustainability. Peer analysis can also help in ensuring any changes are proactive and competitive.
Before setting targets or launching new initiatives, the most effective organisations begin with a structured review of where things stand today. That means not just asking whether you have a policy or a code of conduct, but looking at how well your procurement, sustainability, and leadership teams are aligned around your goals, and how those goals are embedded into your systems, processes, and supplier relationships
Sustainable Supply Chain Programme Maturity
Assessing the maturity of your sustainable supply chain programme will enable you to define a clear path to improvement.
A maturity assessment will enable you to:
- Identify Critical Risks and Compliance Gaps: Global sustainability regulations are evolving rapidly. Understanding where your sustainable supply chain programme may fall short against the evolving landscape allows you to take proactive action before risks turn into penalties or reputational harm.
- Create Strategic Clarity: By highlighting strengths to build on and gaps to close, a maturity assessment brings structure to your programme. It clearly identifies what’s working and what needs improvement, and help prioritise actions that align with your business goals, sustainability commitments and market demands.
- Grow Stakeholder Confidence: Investors, customers, and partners increasingly expect transparency and accountability. A clear maturity assessment positions you to communicate your efforts credibly and confidently and strengthens stakeholder relationships.
- Operate with greater agility and resilience: Knowing your baseline enables faster decision-making, better risk management, and stronger supply chain continuity when facing market or regulatory disruptions.
- Unlock competitive advantage: Sustainability leaders are capturing market share, driving innovation, and future-proofing their supply chains.
Evaluating Your Maturity
Anthesis has created the Sustainable Supply Chain Tool (SCT) to eliminate barriers to understanding your programme’s maturity in an approachable, easy, and efficient way. The tool can be applied to organisations across varying industry types, sizes, and locations and takes into consideration the key elements of leading social and environmental standards and regulations (i.e., EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive) and aims to align with ISO 20400 Sustainable Procurement Guidance.
The Sustainable Supply Chain Tool (SCT) helps structure input, benchmark progress, and highlight critical improvement areas across five essential pillars:
- Policy, Strategy and Communication: Evaluates the existence, integration, and communication of sustainability goals, policies, and strategies within your procurement practices.
- People and Leadership: Assesses governance structures, leadership accountability, and employee training to embed sustainable procurement across the organisation.
- Procurement Process and Practices: Reviews how sustainability considerations are incorporated into supplier onboarding, contracting, due diligence, and ongoing management processes.
- Supplier Engagement and Monitoring: Measures how you engage, collaborate, and communicate with suppliers to drive sustainability improvements throughout your supply chain.
- Measurements and Progress: Focuses on tracking, analysing, and benchmarking performance to ensure continuous improvement and transparency in sustainable procurement.
By guiding users through targeted questions and a simple checklist of key documents and activities, the tool makes it easy to pinpoint gaps and identify strengths. Just as importantly, the process itself fosters internal engagement—bringing together procurement, sustainability, and leadership teams to build shared awareness of supply chain sustainability and the urgency for improvement.
How Anthesis Can Help
The SCT doesn’t just generate a report, it opens the door to strategic conversations and planning. Anthesis’ supply chain experts work closely with clients to interpret results, align internal stakeholders and empower them to build or refine their sustainable supply chain strategy. We co-develop a tailored roadmap with actionable milestones, to ensure you remain compliant, competitive, and resilient. From setting ambition to implementing key actions, we provide the advisory support needed to embed sustainability in procurement processes and drive long-term impact.
Get in touch to learn more about the sustainable Supply Chain Tool (SCT) and how assessing your supply chain sustainability maturity can give you the insight and direction needed to act with confidence, deliver on your commitments, and future-proof your business.
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