Procurement

Suppliers play a vital role in our success and we challenge them to be best in class for service, quality, delivery, cost and sustainability. This requires collaboration and innovation, so we have class-leading Procurement processes and tools in place to encourage and support our suppliers in meeting these requirements and look forward to achieving them together.

To deliver maximum value to our customers and bring together the best solutions, our approach to procurement is flexible, creative and responsive. This way, we partner with innovative, risk and performance managed suppliers, from local MSME’s to multi-national organisations.

Suppliers must complete an evaluation process to ensure they meet our criteria, which is driven by customer and industry standards. This process is also an important first step in managing our supplier relationships. Depending on the level of risk, the process itself varies to ensure that all requirements are proportionate based on the scope but is generally based on:

We only ask suppliers to undertake this process if they are being considered for a contract. If you would like to supply to Telent, please complete this short form to register your interest. This information is stored and may be used for tendering purposes when sourcing new products and services.

Our Procurement team works in conjunction with Telent’s Commercial, Project, Quality, Health & Safety and Environmental Management teams to award contracts based on cost, quality, reliability, innovation and sustainability. Where an existing supplier is being considered, their performance history is also taken into account.

We are committed to working collaboratively with potential and existing suppliers to promote innovation and design the best solutions. Our Responsible Procurement and Supplier Assurance managers are also experienced in working collaboratively with our supply chain to ensure technical compliance, quality, sustainability and environmental targets are met.

The core aim of our supply chain sustainability strategy and ethical code of conduct is to meet our needs for goods and services in a way that achieves value for money on a whole life basis. This is to provide added value not only for our organisation, but also for society and the economy, whilst minimising damage to the environment. We do this by embedding sustainability and social value considerations into all our decision-making processes.

Telent has now committed to matching the UK’s climate target to deliver ‘net zero’ emissions by 2050 and the first important step in realising this ambition is reducing our overall carbon footprint by 50%, no later than 2035. Importantly, this isn’t just the carbon emissions that we create directly, we are also working to reduce the emissions created indirectly within our entire value chain.

90% of our business’s carbon emissions are embedded in the products and services that we purchase, so in 2023 we will begin working with our suppliers to implement various carbon reduction programmes to reduce the carbon footprint of our supply chain.

Through our current supply chain sustainability strategy, we work in collaboration with our suppliers to:

We recognise the significance of MSMEs in realising Telent’s Social Value agenda, in terms of their potential for socio-economic development through local job creation, market growth and innovation. Our MSME Action Plan focusses on providing comprehensive resources and information to:

To enable this, not only do we contract local social value objectives, but have dedicated a minimum of 100 hours per year of our Procurement team’s resources to deliver a range of supplier development opportunities including training materials, guidance, practical support and the opportunity to share best practice. We hold interactive supplier webinars to facilitate peer collaboration on topics such as Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI), Strategic Labour Needs & Training (SLNT), GDPR, Modern Slavery prevention, STEM Education, Carbon Reduction and Quality & Environmental Management Systems.