Organisational enhancements

Procurement is a centralised function in the Group. The heads of Global Sourcing and their 16 category managers work closely with regional procurement managers and report to Corporate Procurement. This allows us to pool our needs worldwide whilst satisfying the service and quality requirements of internal customers.

In order to streamline our regional organisation, we merged North and South America into a single procurement region, thus reducing the number of procurement regions to five. Now the regional competence centres take more responsibility for strategic procurement and the relevant processes.

In the year under review, we opened the DHL Procurement Office China in Shanghai. This office follows the principle of best cost country sourcing, which aims for an optimum balance between cost, quality and risk. The new procurement office will work closely together with all regions to better meet our international requirements.

Our procurement success depends on the skills and calibre of our employees. We therefore continued our Fit4Procurement programme in the reporting year, which put us amongst the 10 best companies to be nominated for the international Talents in Supply Chain Management prize. This prize is awarded by the European Business School and the Supply Chain Management Institute, both private institutions.

Together with these two organisations, we bestowed the ProLog Award for procurement and logistics in 2009 for the third time. This award is given for scientific research with significant practical results. One of the research projects honoured was a study of the ecological aspects of procurement.

Green procurement

Our Green Team, made up of procurement managers from various regions and product groups, takes care of the environmental aspects of procurement. One of the achievements of the Green Team has been to introduce a globally standardised form that suppliers can use to furnish information on how well they meet environmental requirements. Entrenching ecological indicators into the strategic procurement process is also planned. Calculation of the total cost of ownership, for example, now also includes energy and carbon efficiency. This is intended to help us gauge the maturity of our procurement markets in terms of environmental friendliness so that if necessary, we can switch to more environmentally friendly procurement sources.

In many cases, environmental aspects are already being taken into account in procurement. We are one of Deutsche Bahn’s first key accounts to use its new, climatefriendly Umwelt Plus Ticket (environment plus ticket) for all business trips. This means that 100% of the electricity used comes from renewable energy sources. The agreement with Deutsche Bahn was concluded with retroactive effect as of 1 January 2009. Therefore, the 74,319 tickets used in 2009 resulted in savings of around 2,134 tonnes of CO₂ emissions.

Another example is the new, eco-friendly mail sorting machines we purchased from Siemens AG. Siemens will deliver 288 sorting machines for standard and compact letters and up to 97 sorting systems for flats and maxi flats by 2012. The new sorting machines for standard and compact letters alone will reduce our CO₂ emissions by nearly 5,000 tonnes per year, and they also use 55% less energy.