By identifying and embracing the challenges in our value chain, we bolster resiliency with our employees (U Krewers), customers, and external stakeholders.
Our Approach to Sustainable Procurement
UKG is committed to protecting our planet and collaborating with stakeholders across our value chain to address the effects of climate change. We drive sustainability efforts through every aspect of our business and hold our suppliers to the same level of accountability.
Creating Change Through Policy
UKG is committed to following the law and maintaining high ethical standards, and we expect the same from the suppliers, vendors, partners, and other third parties with which we do business. We believe in providing a clear set of guidelines and policies to build a strong path forward in our sustainable procurement initiatives.
- Third Party Code of Conduct
We are committed to finding partnerships within our supply chain, reducing our environmental impact, and increasing diversity in our entire value chain. It’s simply the right thing to do. To honor this commitment, our Third Party Code of Conduct includes a section on UKG’s expectations of our suppliers’ environmental impact.
- Global Travel and Expense Policy
The UKG Global Travel and Expense Policy, which lives on our employee intranet, UKG Today, reflects our commitment to environmental sustainability and ESG. This includes a section dedicated to environmental considerations and indicates which travel methods have the lowest environmental impact. The policy provides suggestions for keeping employee travel in line with UKG's Global Environmental Policy and ESG commitments.
- Global Environmental Policy
Our Global Environmental Policy includes a section on sustainable procurement which outlines key areas of consideration when selecting materials and vendors. A few core areas are:
- Prioritizing the procurement of environmentally sustainable products and services by working closely with our suppliers to encourage their adoption of sustainable practices and by considering environmental factors when selecting vendors and partners
- Annually analyzing and evaluating environmental impact in our supply chain
- Including environmental criteria in our supplier selection and supplier performance evaluation processes
- Outlining our commitment to the environment in our UKG Third Party Code of Conduct, and confirming our expectation that suppliers comply with all applicable environmental regulations wherever they do business
Our Sustainability Expectations for Suppliers
UKG is a signatory of the United Nations Global Compact and is committed to developing environmentally friendly products and services. We expect the suppliers we do business with to operate in an environmentally responsible manner and we value working with third parties that have ambitious climate goals, targets, and commitments.
Creating More Sustainable Products
We understand that our business decisions and climate actions impact our customers. When we reduce our emissions, we are also reducing those of our customers. By offering more sustainable products and services, we not only get closer to meeting our own goals, but we also can help customers meet theirs. Through increasing our cloud services utilization and ensuring our suppliers use more sustainable packaging for our hardware components, we aim to reduce our environmental impact.
Cloud Services and Products
As a global technology company with many of our products delivered via cloud solutions, we continuously evaluate our own technology footprint to ensure efficiencies associated with our growth strategy, to deliver impactful software solutions, and to provide safe and effective tools and technologies to our employees, customers, partners, and vendors. Our Information Technology (IT) and Cloud groups continuously seek to improve energy efficiency, including the expanded use of virtual servers and the enhancement of sustainable data center practices.
Business IT use is increasingly in the cloud, which helps reduce operating costs and eliminate material amounts of paper on behalf of UKG customers. Data center server, switch, and router products also help us enable energy-efficient cloud computing and connectivity provisioning.
Hardware Products
Our hardware products are shipped and used all over the globe. To ensure a complete accounting of our environmental impact, we include the emissions from the lifetime use of our products by our customers. Collecting this valuable information and having these insights allows us to look further into our partnerships and relationships with our hardware product manufacturers. We can work with our manufacturers to ensure our products are made with sustainable materials and are as energy efficient as possible.
We also continually work with our manufacturing and packaging vendors on low-environmental impact packaging and manufacturing solutions. We continue to reduce plastic packaging for our hardware and utilized more efficient shipping methods and strategies to limit the impact on the environment associated with our products.