Working with customers

We aim to be more than a supplier to our customers.  We want to work in partnership understanding each customer as an individual helping them to make their business grow efficiently.  One key area where we have found that our relationships have blossomed is through developing environmental initiatives. 

Many of our customers have well developed and respected corporate responsibility programmes.  However, there are many more that would never claim to be experts in this arena.  Developing an environmental programme that is actually meaningful is sometimes daunting.  Knowing where to find information, who to trust and what technologies and techniques provide real benefits is hard.

We are very honoured to have helped a number of our customers to reduce their own environmental footprints.  The help we can offer varies widely.

1. We can help reduce the environmental footprint of your supply chain.  This can also have massive cost saving benefits; for example, we have recently helped a social enterprise save over £60,000 by moving to environmentally responsible material.
2. We can help reduce your operational carbon footprint through our services.  For example, a recent project we implemented for a financial customer will save over 60 tonnes of carbon a year.
3. We can help you to energise staff to be involved in environmental programmes.  We have hosted and led seminars for a number of private and public organisations for their “green teams”.  One such team has subsequently helped their organisation to reduce their carbon footprint by over 20%.
4. We can help you to create an entire environmental management system.  For example, we have worked with a public agency to develop a system that has recently been assessed by BSi to be awarded ISO 14001.

Working with suppliers

We are also engaging with our suppliers to help them to reduce their environmental impacts.  Through our Supplier Assessment Programme and continual engagement, we aim to help our suppliers to become more sustainable.  Each suppler is graded in 15 key areas and where improvements need to be made within an agreed timeframe we are on hand to support them.

Additionally our enhanced suppler and manufacturer interaction has enabled us to field over 10,000 products and services which have measureable environmental benefits.  We are also constantly on the lookout for new environmental products.  This is not about adding a few gimmicks to our catalogues.

 We believe that environmental considerations can be part of any purchasing decision, and with our wealth of experience in the industry, we would like to encourage everyone to do their part in addressing the critical issues of sustainability that affect all our businesses.