In almost all countries covered by this Sustainability Report, purchasing procedures (from researching suppliers to signing contracts) are carried out either by
a common services company, as is the case in Italy, Austria, Germany and Spain,
or by a central purchasing service at the holding company, as is the case in France,
in Italy for the Banca Generali Group and in Switzerland for BSI. Other frameworks
are adopted:
- in Israel, where the management of insurance company purchases is only partly
centralised. It is in fact dealt with by the purchasing managers of the relative
company departments - IT, operations, property management, support systems (communication,
archives, etc.), agent training and events, marketing and advertising, human resources,
employee training and professional services - who report to a group purchasing
manager;
- in Switzerland, where all purchases are made by the individual insurance companies.
In the IT sector, the Corporate Centre recently set up the Group ICT Procurement
(GIP) department to manage commercial relations with global suppliers of IT goods
and services on a Group level, exploiting economies of scale.
When selecting contractual partners, there are clear, firm and non-discriminatory procedures
which are based on objective criteria linked to competitiveness and to the quality
of the products and services provided.
As stated previously, in addition to the measures adopted to ensure supply chain integrity, the Group has adopted preferential selection criteria as part of its purchasing
processes to encourage its suppliers to adopt socially and environmentally responsible behaviour. All countries have similar procedures and practices in place, although for
the time being none requires suppliers to provide mandatory environmental certification
(such as ISO 14001) or social certification (SA 8000).
In some cases, the criteria used to select suppliers reflect a particular attention
to the environment (local purchases) or to disadvantaged persons (purchases from
non-profit organisations or social cooperatives).
The Group is committed to service quality and has implemented various supplier
evaluation and ongoing monitoring systems. Virtually all companies review supplier collaboration, especially when
it comes to major suppliers, checking operations to ensure the quality of goods
and services and fair pricing.
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