Our progress towards being a more sustainable organisation creating more sustainable events now depends more than ever on collaborating with our partners and suppliers to drive change across the whole value chain.

At a strategic level, our supply chain is managed by our global procurement teams, who work hand in hand with our group sustainability team. Each agency has a procurement responsibility in line with our Code of Business Conduct, which helps to keep our operations as sustainable as possible at the supply level.

Our supplier code of conduct outlines our minimum expectations in terms of labour practices (such as discrimination, decent work and health and safety), human rights (including child or forced labour), ethical matters (anti-bribery and corruption) as well as environmental commitments. The document also states that we will give preference to suppliers with the best sustainability practices, and include a right to audit provision.

We expect all our partners, suppliers and subcontractors to adhere to and support this code, which is why it is an integral part of our vendors agreement, and all our suppliers must sign.

Scale of supply chain

Our extensive solutions portfolio and intricate organisational structure means we have a complex and dynamic supply chain ecosystem to manage. On average, our teams contract yearly with close to 50,000 suppliers. They fall into two categories: those providing goods and services for our company operations (IT, office space rental and maintenance, telecommunications, travel, bank, insurance and other services) and the largest group comprises of the whole range of providers we sub-contract on behalf of our clients (venues, hotels, catering services, transportation, décor, entertainment, digital services, etc.) to manage their projects.

In 2023, we spent €300+ million on third-party suppliers to manage client operations. This does not factor in the indirect spend on behalf of our clients, wherein we were acting as an agent.

In addition, we contracted more than 1 million hotel room/nights for a total estimated spend of €315+ million.

Supplier engagement

Suppliers are increasingly committed to environmental and social best practices which, in turn, helps us to deliver more sustainable projects.

However, there is always more to be done. To ensure that the supply process is constantly being refined, we continuously engage with our suppliers and partners to define how we can accelerate improvements across the value chain together.

A sustainable procurement policy is beginning to take shape with our different categories of suppliers, and we now have around 10,000 suppliers worldwide who have directly or indirectly signed our Supplier Code of Conduct:

• Our Preferred Partners: the world’s largest hotel chains managed by our procurement group team. Today the top 10 hotel chain groups have signed our Supplier Code of Conduct, representing around +9,000 hotels.
• Our Strategic Partners: a network of local offices and strategic DMC (Destination Management Company) partners managed by Ovation. This represents 42 selected Strategic Partners and 25 Ovation offices that align with Ovation’s sustainability goals, and adhere to Ovation’s & MCI’s Code of Conduct.
• Our local preferred partners: a list of more than 300 regular partners selected by the offices (based on total spend), among them specialists in transportation, venues, catering companies or other event services providers. Our largest offices are beginning to structure themselves to launch the “Local Procurement Task Force”, consisting of talents who are committed to focusing on reviewing and assessing local partners and suppliers, actively engaging with their suppliers to ensure they align with our ESG goals. The task force will provide internal knowledge, training and guidance to all talents on how to assess and promote ESG for all our suppliers.

Assessing performance

An initial assessment of our suppliers is done through our internal safety event audit tool. Further evaluations of supplier compliance against our code of conduct are then conducted on both random and specific bases.

Our local and group procurement teams are also provided with tools to evaluate performance independently. For high-profile events, our group sustainability team may be involved in assessing and auditing performance.

We have identified supplier assessment as an area where we need to improve and create more rigorous procurement processes and define a tracking methodology. An audit task force, consisting of our group data protection, risk & compliance officer, our global procurement manager, our group sustainability team and one member of our executive team, is working on an audit approach that will cover: risk and financial analysis, data protection, information security system, ethics and social and environmental criteria.

As a first step in our supplier assessment approach, we plan to launch a new platform in 2024 that will enable us to implement a pre-engagement supplier due diligence questionnaire that will cover data protection, compliance, sustainability, human rights and labour standards.