Julie Maconochie, our Head of Financial Control, has become one of 108 people from around the world to graduate from a project focused on ensuring sustainability runs at the heart of an organisation’s strategy, operations and reporting.
The Princes Accounting for Sustainability Project (A4s), launched by King Charles III in 2004, is designed to inspire finance leaders to introduce new business models so that decision-making becomes more sustainable.
Julie embarked on an 18-month course with the A4s academy which provided all the knowledge, guidance and support to help her carry out a practical case study for LiveWest on how to embed sustainability factors into finance and the wider organisation.
The role of the academy is to provide valuable insight and ideas to ensure organisations have sustainable business models for the future and to help translate an organisation’s commitment into action.
By joining the programme, Julie has gained significant technical knowledge on sustainability and the journey to net zero but also the skills to drive change which will have a positive impact on the organisation.
Her case study has helped LiveWest to better capture, monitor and steer its supply chain’s environmental initiatives.
Reflecting on her journey, Julie said: “It was a privilege for me to join the A4s graduate programme as it provided a unique opportunity to network with peers from some of the world’s largest organisations, share best practice and exchange insights.
“To have achieved and progressed all objectives, along with embedding sustainability within our whole procurement process, has been one of my proudest achievements.
”Having the opportunity to bring together and work with other areas of the business and collaborate to enable us as a team to achieve our objectives has also allowed us to build working relationships that extend beyond this project.
“The potential to improve sustainability within organisations is huge and potentially overwhelming. It requires time and cultural change which can only happen with leadership support and consistency.
“We have a huge organisational supply chain, and we need to drive and understand our overall impact on the environment.
“We are committed to promoting a sustainable, low carbon supply chain throughout our procurement practices, and can use our buying power to leverage environmental, economic and social value partnerships.
“By embedding some minimum sustainability requirements, and a method (initially through a supplier survey) to capture progress, we can start to understand where we can influence our supply chain and the impact this can have, both to our environmental journey and to the lives of our customers.”
Melvyn Garrett, Deputy Chief Executive for LiveWest, has been a member of the A4s Chief Financial Officers’ (CFO) leadership network for a number of years.
Melvyn commented: “This project has raised the awareness across our organisation of the environmental and social impacts of our procurement decisions.
“As a result, the Finance team has been able to work with procurement in ensuring these impacts are reflected in the procurement processes going forward.
“Although environmental and social impacts are already considered in many of the financial choices that we make, by agreeing more focussed criteria in the tendering process we can confirm that sustainability will also become embedded into financial decision-making in our procurement choices.
“Julie has delivered this project during a challenging economic and financial period where there were multiple demands on her time. Through her determination she has been able to bring other areas of the business along with her and has been successful in changing other colleagues’ mindsets.
“We see this project as a way of encouraging our significant supplier base to further consider their actions in the context of sustainability and, as such, the implementation of this plan should have a real multiplier impact.”