Sustainable Procurement: how to meet sustainability objectives without adding complexity

According to Keelvar’s 2025 Voices of Sourcing report, sustainability has moved up the agenda for global procurement leaders. 33% report that achieving sustainability goals is a top priority in 2025, the second highest priority overall. This compares to only 12% in 2024. 

Organizations face growing pressure to ensure their supply chains meet environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria. But while sustainable sourcing is a key strategy for protecting the planet, mitigating risks, and ensuring compliance, it also comes with its own set of challenges. 

In this guide, learn how to turn sustainable sourcing from yet another objective to meet into a competitive differentiator through innovative solutions like Keelvar and Ecovadis.

Why does Sustainable Sourcing matter?

Sustainable sourcing is under increasing scrutiny as nations tighten climate targets and companies face greater pressure to reduce their environmental footprint. A significant portion of organizations’ total emissions, particularly Scope 3 emissions, often comes from their supply chain, meaning procurement and supply chain teams play a key role achieving overall sustainability goals. Procurement teams today must consider more than just cost: ethical sourcing and regulatory compliance must become key factors in supplier selection.

Why is Sustainable Sourcing hard today?

In short, there are a number of pain points that hinder procurement teams trying to meeting their sustainability objectives:

1. Data fragmentation: ESG data often resides in separate systems, making it hard to integrate into sourcing workflows.
2. Lack of standardization: without standardized ESG criteria, comparing supplier performance becomes a daunting task.
3. Manual effort: many teams still rely on time-consuming processes to track and update ESG scores.
4. Balancing cost with sustainability: achieving sustainable procurement goals while keeping costs competitive requires careful consideration of trade-offs.
5. Regulatory compliance: keeping up with the evolving regulations across multiple regions and ensuring compliance is a mammoth task that can’t always be prioritized.

This adds a massive burden onto procurement teams who often struggle to keep up with the manual effort required to collect, verify, and report ESG data, all while trying to meet their primary sourcing objectives which are often centered around cost savings. 

ProcureTech’s Role in tackling Sustainable Procurement challenges

One example of technology which is very well suited to mitigate the challenges of sustainable sourcing is Advanced Sourcing Optimization. It enables Procurement teams to lean into data complexity by treating sustainability factors with the same importance as cost factors, without creating more complexity when making award decisions. 

Specifically, Sourcing Optimization allows teams to create varied and complex scenarios tailored to their sourcing needs. They can then view the outcomes of all scenarios in an easily-reviewed, ‘apple to apple’ table, and make an award decision without trading off between time spent and quality of decision making. 

Therefore, enriching bid data with sustainability data is a textbook use case of advanced Sourcing Optimization technology. The capabilities of Sourcing Optimization allow procurement teams to lean into more complex, richer data to make better decisions without adding complexity to the actual sourcing process. 

This presents a wide range of benefits towards sustainable sourcing: ‍

Automated ESG Data Integration

The key advantage of a sourcing optimization solution with enriched ESG data is that it removes manual ESG data search and ensures procurement teams always have access to up-to-date sustainability scores. With ESG insights embedded into supplier profiles, teams can make informed sourcing decisions without switching between systems or relying on outdated information.

Simplified Supplier Selection

The addition of sustainability data into sourcing optimization also allows procurement teams to quickly assess a supplier’s sustainability performance, which significantly simplifies the process of selecting suppliers based on this criteria. With this data, businesses can prioritize suppliers that align with their sustainability goals. Embedding these insights directly into the sourcing workflow facilitates the consideration of sustainability factors proactively and no longer as an afterthought.

Enhanced Compliance and Reporting

Compliance with regulations like the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) is made easier with verified ESG data, especially reporting and providing proof of due diligence for regulators and stakeholders. This type of integration also helps businesses track their Scope 3 emissions, supporting efforts to reduce indirect environmental impacts.

Efficiency Without Compromise

By integrating sustainability data directly into bid sheets, procurement teams can include it in complex scenario analysis without actually adding any workload or complexity. Simplifying the data collection and analysis process allows teams to focus on strategic decisions that drive cost savings and sustainability simultaneously. 

Building Long-Term Value

At its core, the integrating sustainability performance into advanced sourcing optimization is about making sustainable sourcing more than an afterthought to consider when reporting, and instead use it to deliver long-term value. By including real-time ESG data in their sourcing decisions, procurement teams can optimize supplier selection and continuously improve their sustainability performance. Over time, this not only strengthens the supply chain but also enhances brand reputation and investor confidence.

Delivering Value: A Competitive Advantage

Integrating sustainability into bid data, and using Sourcing Optimization to take away from the complexity of sourcing decisions is a game-changer for procurement teams. Rather than treating sustainability as a checkbox, it empowers them to act on verified data and make sustainability a strategic advantage. 

Keelvar, a leading provider of Sourcing Optimization, now supports an integration with EcoVadis, a sustainability intelligence platform, to address the challenges of sustainable sourcing head-on. In practice, this integration automates the sustainability data import process, simplifies supplier evaluation based on their sustainability performance, and ensures compliance to ESG regulations. 

Ultimately, this approach aligns with Keelvar’s core mission to drive smarter sourcing decisions through data-driven insights. With the added benefit of sustainability embedded into every step of the process, procurement teams can take a more proactive role in shaping their company’s ESG outcomes.

To find out more about how Keelvar can help you achieve your sustainability goals, get in touch with us now.