Suppliers and Business Partners

Our approach to suppliers and business partners is strongly attached to our core values and ethical standards. Long-term value for all is created by maintaining collaborative, cooperative, and strong business relationships with our suppliers and partners. We embody and prioritize the building of trust, respect and mutual benefit throughout our value chain, placing emphasis on the efficient management of our supply chain, to deliver greater impact to all our stakeholders and minimize any potential risks that could harm our reputation and business continuity.

 

We have a diverse supply chain that spans a wide variety of products and services from 1,992 national and international suppliers and business partners. There are three general types of procurement with appropriate procedures for each:

 

The basic group of suppliers and business partners, that forms our supply chain, includes the following supply categories:

It is worth mentioning that we aim to source as many products and services as possible from local suppliers and contractors in order to support the local community and help stimulate national economic growth. In 2021, the proportion of spending on local suppliers was 73.8%

To cement our commitment to responsible and sustainable procurement, our Procurement Policy was launched in 2015 to communicate our company-wide strategic approach to procurement and integration across our activities. Creating far-reaching impact across all our personnel, the policy outlines the obligations of staff and contractors, ensuring consistent and transparent procurement practices and defining our operational approach to sustainable procurement. Additionally, in parallel with the policy, we endorsed a supplier’s regulation that clearly outlines procedures regarding cooperation with our suppliers and subcontractors.

 

Given the ever-changing regulatory environment with regards to sustainability, we felt it was necessary to update our procurement approach during 2021, and therefore our policy underwent significant changes in order to streamline with our governance framework. A current state and gap analysis assessment was performed during 2021, using an external independent consultant, and the results were used in the update of our Procurement Policy. During this assessment, our procurement team was recognized for its significant levels of maturity ranging between advanced and differentiated. Though this analysis confirmed our high level of procurement practices, there is still room to implement increasingly targeted actions which could further enhance procurement’s value to our organization and updating our procurement policy to further streamline our approach is an example of this and this is evidenced by the targets we have set for 2022 and onwards.

 

As a whole, we are committed to acting ethically and with integrity across all our business relationships, and we have zero-tolerance to modern slavery and human trafficking. Thus, in order to demonstrate our commitment, it remains a key priority for us to fully integrate the processes and controls relating to modern slavery and human trafficking issues in our procurement policy.

A key risk management process of our Company is the screening of our suppliers and business partners before contracting them. We implement a pre-evaluation process in regards to our suppliers’ and business partners’ integrity.

 

Our procurement department implements a selection process that includes competitive quotations providing:

 

 

In certain instances, suppliers may be eligible for registration but are not necessarily qualified for a certain procurement action. This latter status is only determined after a pre-qualification or a tender evaluation exercise according to our assessment criteria.

 

For strategic suppliers, the procurement department pre-evaluates the applicants by requesting the following:

 

Provided by the applicant the below:

Provided by independent body (ICAP) the below:

We evaluate our suppliers annually using both quantitative and qualitative assessment. The performance of 76 strategic suppliers is assessed constantly, with a clear focus on quality and delivery. Notably, our suppliers that achieve a score of between 40 and 60 in their supplier evaluation are considered as those with sufficient performance. We also consider other criteria, such as: flexibility, daily operational support, social and environmental performance, ISO certifications, GDPR policy, Code of Conduct and competitiveness. To guarantee a result that represents our Company as a whole, Netcompany-Intrasoft specific stakeholders, such as Project Managers and Facility Managers participate in the evaluation process and give appropriate feedback, providing an assessment based on sectoral risk per each category of supplier.

 

Since 2020, we have been holding our “Supplier and business partner awards event” on an annual basis, where our top 10 suppliers are recognized for going above and beyond the call of duty. This reward is a recognition for our suppliers, which they can utilize as evidence of their high performance. For us, this event is also an opportunity to brief suppliers on performance and future plans, linking their performance to a direct contribution to our Company’s strategic objectives. For those who haven’t been recognized for their high performance, we give feedback and discuss areas for improvement. It is crucial for us to take their needs into consideration, understanding their supplier perspective prior to us introducing suggestions for improvement.