About the Supplier Engagement Tool

The NETpositive Supplier Engagement Tool enables your company to develop a free NETpositive Sustainability action plan in line with the environmental, sustainability and institutional objectives of your customers. You might have been asked to complete an action plan by one of the purchasing consortia (HEPCW, NEUPC, NWUPC, SUPC or TUCO), by one of the 60 universities using the tool.

The Tool demonstrates that sustainability is not just about reducing energy or recycling but also about how sustainability relates to your core business practice and importantly how to maximise your social value and economic impact through the choices you make and the things you do.

How the tool works

Completing your action plan should be a simple and relatively quick process:

  • You will receive an email link enabling you to register to use the Tool (this is free). You enter some simple information about your company, where you are based and the type of goods or services you provide.
  • The system generates a simple NETpositive analysis, which identifies the potential positive and negative environmental, social and economic impacts of your company. Once you have selected the impacts that you believe are relevant to your company you click on the ‘button to generate your action plan.
  • The action plan generated reflects the impacts you have identified. For each impact; positive and negative, there are a number of actions to keep, delete or add to in order to address the identified impact.

You can watch a simple guide to creating your action plan here.

Benefits of using the tool

Suppliers using the tool will be able to:

  • Undertake a simple sustainability analysis of your company impacts
  • Create a bespoke action plan to help you become a sustainable supplier in line with your customers’ environmental, sustainability and corporate commitments
  • Be signposted to business -relevant information, events and activities that will support your sustainability journey
  • Demonstrate progress against your individual action plans
  • Utilise the action plan to communicate what you are actually doing rather than what you are committed to at a policy level.
  • Prepare for contract management discussions on sustainability with your  customers.

Please note that the link to the Tool is not publicly available, as you will be invited to complete an action plan by one of your university customers, if appropriate, and they will send the link.

If you have any technical difficulties using the tool once you have the link please email Sandra at NETpositive Futures on admin@netpositivefutures.co.uk

Share your action plan

Share your Action Plan

Use the ‘share’ button at the end of the actions page to give other colleagues access to your action plan. This enables more than one person to contribute to the plan and means you do not need to have duplicate plans for your company.

Revisit your Action Plan

Regularly re-visit your plan to ensure that the information is up-to-date, for example if the information on the universities you supply changes. Also, ensure you re-visit your actions to up-date if you need to mark as ‘complete’ your ‘in progress’ actions or move from ‘not started’ to ‘in progress’. Be sure to add evidence against your actions to demonstrate to your customers what your company is actually doing with regards to sustainability.

What the data from your action plans tells your customers

Click on the image below to have a look at an example of infographics that can be produced by your customers to illustrate the actions being taken by their suppliers.

Click on the image to see example infographic