Corporate Social Responsibility – local sourcing as opportunity

With Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), a company independently imposes a social responsibility on itself with regard to sustainable business. This includes economic, social, and of course ecological aspects such as climate protection, local commitment or fair business practices. While numerous rules and laws already promote sustainability or punish excessive consumption, Corporate Social Responsibility reaches beyond this. With CSR, the company recognises its responsibility and makes an additional commitment to the environment. In this process, local sourcing can play an important role.

What is "local sourcing"?

Local sourcing primarily involves using local suppliers to set up and run your event. This stands in contrast to global sourcing, which can be cheaper than the local approach due to cheaper goods, but ignores aspects such as working conditions and the carbon footprint. Accordingly, your company will fulfil part of its Corporate Social Responsibility if you consciously decide in favour of local sourcing – in addition, you can also save costs by using local suppliers. We will show you how to do this later on.

Advantages and disadvantages of local sourcing

Although Corporate Social Responsibility goes beyond legal requirements and thus appears inefficient at first glance, there are of course various advantages for you. A practical example from our work: When organising a large Gala in Milano, we were able to serve fresh fruit and vegetables from the region thanks to local sourcing.

Furthermore, the following advantages arise for you, among others:

• Short transport routes reduce the risk of delivery problems. Strikes and customs formalities at (air)ports are thus virtually eliminated.
• The currencies remain the same, which eliminates the exchange rate risk.
• The contact between the organiser and the surroundings is closer. This increases the bond between you and the local supplies, so you receive information about possible offers even quicker.
• Due to shorter transport routes, the energy costs that would otherwise be incurred for refrigerating food and for fuel are lower.

Basically, the only downside to local sourcing is that the goods and materials for your event may come at a higher cost. However, as you will see below, this bill is worth it if you work with a reliable event architect.

Local Sourcing with Scenotech

Scenotech gives you the opportunity to fulfil your Corporate Social Responsibility with Local Sourcing. Generally, we are able to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions for an event by up to 70 percent. Among other things, this is achieved by keeping logistics costs to a minimum. This includes the transport of goods by air and water as well as the transport of people for internal project participants, who can avoid flights and hotel shuttles, for example. In the course of site visits and planning trips, we also use specialised planning tools, which combine those excursions or eliminate the need for them.

Are you in doubt about your CSR strategy due to a lack of project partners? Then Scenotech offers you a solution. We use the most professional tender and awarding software, to provide you with all the resources and discover highly qualified partners from the region. In addition, we work out realistic market target prices in advance, i.e. already in the initiation phase of the project, so that you can always estimate your budgets and obtain financial stability. Of course, we also provide you with additional contingency plans in case of last-minute changes in the event planning. This includes, among other things, ensuring the availability of materials with the help of local sourcing. If one partner company drops out at short notice, the second is already ready.

In any case, close cooperation with the customers and suppliers is a priority for us. At Scenotech, we are aware of how valuable long-term relationships are in business and how the consistency that comes with them can save valuable time and money. Accordingly, cultivating these partnerships also takes on an important role in event architecture.

Contact us to embrace your Corporate Social Responsibility at the next event.