Partners in Sustainable Procurement: Hilton Worldwide and BSR

Authors

Guest perspective by William Kornegay, Senior Vice President, Hilton Supply Management, Hilton Worldwide

As hospitality procurement professionals, our primary function is to purchase and deliver all the goods and services a property will need to operate on a day-to-day basis, subject to the performance standards established by our corporate business partners. Historically, we have measured the efficacy of this process against a standard set of key performance indicators (KPIs), such as on-time and in-full delivery, product quality performance, and product cost.

For some time, we’ve been working to understand the sustainability impact of the goods and services Hilton Worldwide purchases on a yearly basis. Through our proprietary system called LightStay, we aggregated a considerable volume of Hilton Worldwide’s purchasing data for analysis and comparison in the hopes of integrating this information as part of our overall measured performance. 

While we’ve made great progress, we were still left with the difficulty of factoring in this new sustainability data to enhance the procurement process and create an additional KPI measure. It seemed the more information we had, the more complex questions we needed to answer.

Leveraging BSR’s research, we partnered to create the Center for Sustainable Procurement, which we hope will answer the many questions this new level of data has created, as well as to engage others in dialog to develop further insights and elevate the conversation. By collaborating with other companies working in this space, procurement professionals will be able to benefit from individual lessons and make progress faster.

Sustainability is a journey; the more we learn, the more there is to learn. We remain hopeful that this initiative will catalyze our collective understanding, filter out the hype, and allow us to integrate data-driven product information to benefit the procurement process and help us live up to our global responsibilities as stewards of our planet’s limited natural resources.