Last week, Art of Procurement joined forces with Supply Chain Now and Buyers Meeting Point to host the 2022 Supply Chain and Procurement Awards. The live ceremony, which you can watch here, was an opportunity to celebrate the amazing results procurement has achieved over the last year, despite headwinds from the economy, supply chain disruptions, and continued pandemic complications.
We presented awards in a number of categories, but two were specifically dedicated to procurement: Procurement Technology Trailblazer and Reimagining the Power of Procurement.
The winner of the 2022 Reimagining the Power of Procurement Award is T-Mobile.
Procurement has progressed significantly since entering the corporate scene as purchasing agents. That is due as much to expanding requirements driven by executive teams, consumers, and markets, as it is the vision of disruptive innovators who are changing the field from within. This award was presented to T-Mobile for showing an extraordinary ability to innovate and drive growth while still delivering ‘table stakes’ results such as savings and risk management.
The T-Mobile team went far beyond typical procurement objectives in an effort to support the company’s 100% renewables target while also saving money for consumers.
The T-Mobile sustainability team reevaluated their approach to subscribing to community solar programs, a key way the company “greens the grid” in the communities they serve. They had been negotiating with each developer individually, a practice that was time consuming, didn’t produce savings at the scale on the desired timeline, and did not require solar developers to include non-project Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) as part of their offerings.
It took T-Mobile team members 14 months to evaluate and execute a handful of agreements with a single developer. This pace was not sustainable because once a solar project is fully subscribed, it’s essentially closed to other corporate clients for the life of the asset (up to 25 years). For community solar participation to have a real impact, they needed to dramatically increase the number of subscribed projects and associated savings that would be used to procure unbundled RECs.
The T-Mobile sustainability team initiated a repeatable “factory-style” approach to optimize program results. The timeline was reduced by 50%. While it had taken 14 months to generate five agreements, the team produced 32 additional agreements in six states in just seven months. The program will generate 2.1 million MWh’s over 25 years and the expected savings increased from a few million dollars to tens of millions over the life of the agreements.
As T-Mobile stated in their application, “It’s evidence that when reimagined, procurement can have a transformational impact on our environment, our suppliers, employees, and customers.”
We firmly agree, and are impressed by their ability to 10x their impact through strategic process improvements. Congratulations to the T-Mobile team!
