Tampere Universities carbon neutral 2030 : an assessment on procurement practice

Global warming and climate change have a significantly growing impact on human existence. One important contributor to the growing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is the transport sector and since the organisation is dependent on goods and services from suppliers for optimal functioning. There is a need for a sustainable procurement program or “green” procurement. The objective of this thesis was to identify the criteria of sustainable procurement and the potential of E-procurement in supporting it. Three research questions were used to identify the problem: (1) What are the current challenges with the procurement process of the university and how does E-procurement mitigate it? (2) What is the role of E-procurement in sustainable initiatives? (3) How to adopt E-procurement and sustainable procurement to Tampere Universities? The research is based on action research a sub-branch in qualitative methodology. The primary data is gathered from interviews while several articles, books served as secondary data to support the research. There is an exploration through public procurement, sustainable procurement, E-procurement, and supplier criteria ranking. As a result, the thesis suggested a combination of environmental life cycle cost analysis and E-procurement solution. The three steps to supplier selection criteria are developed as 1) Product selection, where goods or category of goods with highest environmental impact is selected from ABC analysis, 2) Disassemble of parts where four important aspects of sustainable development: environmental, financial, social, and product quality are able to be grade equally for each supplier in the tendering process, 3) Development of cost card, which is a set of questions used to assess supplier in each sustainable component. While the E-procurement system offers real-time data tracking, data analysis, and fast information communication to support the selection process. The topic of this thesis included certain limitations from the concept used to lack of actual hypothesis testing of the outcome. However, this allowed possible future research to be developed upon