EcoVadis and several leading global hospitality organizations – Accor, Hilton, IHG Hotels & Resorts, Marriott International and Radisson Hotel Group, and two global hospitality group purchasing organizations, Avendra and Entegra – recently announced the launch of the Hospitality Alliance for Responsible Procurement (HARP). Driven by members’ commitment to improve sustainability performance, the Alliance will work to accelerate sustainable practices by fostering close collaboration with trading partners to build transparency and scale positive impact across their value chains.
“As companies seek to engage their value chain partners in their sustainability efforts, they realize the complex scope, as well as common challenges, in their own sector,” said Richard Eyram, Chief Customer Officer at EcoVadis. “It is through partnerships and industry-wide collaboration that the hospitality industry can maximize its collective impact. By joining forces, enabling more strategic focus and sharing best practices, HARP members can focus on positive outcomes that help pave the way towards their sustainability targets.”
Bringing a broad-based assessment program and platform around sustainability for the industry value chain, the HARP initiative addresses core challenges faced by its collective supplier sustainability programs including:
- Scaling up visibility by strengthening supplier engagement rate, starting with the supplier assessment;
- Accelerating suppliers’ performance improvement curve;
- Enhancing the relevance of those engagements with a focus on the industry’s key categories.
To achieve all of these goals, HARP has chosen to utilize EcoVadis’ proven sustainability rating methodology, scorecards, and improvement platform. The EcoVadis Sector Initiative features are built as an antitrust-compliant network and allow for more efficient supplier onboarding, transparency, as well as collaboration and analytics. Together, these capabilities aim at delivering HARP visibility across the hospitality supply chain’s sustainability performance and allowing HARP members to more effectively implement changes on the top priorities of their industry. This results in a positive message towards their supplier community and a more coherent direction to enable targeted improvement. To realize this targeted improvement and meet the requirements of the hospitality industry, HARP member suppliers will have access to additional capacity-building and engagement activities, as well as tools and best practices.
Together, the seven HARP founding members rated more than 2,000 suppliers upon the initiative’s founding. HARP plans to further expand this number to gain greater insight into the sustainability performance of its supply chain and drive maximum improvement.
For more information about HARP, visit: https://sector.ecovadis.com/ the-hospitality-alliance-for-responsible-procurement-initiative-harp/
