By  Reginald Layton, Johnson Controls

When it comes to supplier diversity, it is normal to talk about topics such as:

• Achieving credibility through certification.
• Getting buy-in from an organization’s top levels as well as at the grassroots operating levels.
• Expanding the pool of competitive suppliers and marketing partners.
• Helping the public understand what the initiative is all about.
• Making sure the initiatives continue even in tough economic times.
• Showing the connection between the initiative and the company’s financial outcomes.

These ideas were discussed at a recent event sponsored by Johnson Controls that included about 200 executives from companies such as KeyBank, Dell Computers, WalMart, Verizon, Toyota and the Big Three automakers. The group was there to acknowledge Johnson Controls for 15 years of supplier diversity success and to understand best practices.

Supplier diversity is the concept of developing business strategies and partnerships with certified women and minority-owned businesses in an effort to improve business practices and engage an increasingly diverse population. At the event, representatives of the Billion Dollar Roundtable (corporations that each purchase more than $1 billion annually from diverse suppliers) addressed a variety of issues, including those noted above.

As I listened to the executives talk about how to manage the challenges typically faced when developing supplier diversity programs, and the amazing results they found when working with suppliers who have a fresh approach, I couldn’t help thinking of the similarities in the green and supplier diversity movements. Both have been seen as just trends or categorized as merely public relations or corporate social responsibility.

There’s a growing realization, however, that true commitment to sustainability’s triple bottom line of social, environmental and economic elements is not just a “program,” but as several speakers mentioned, is a “process” that must be integrated, just as safety, lean and quality initiatives are now a standard part of sound business practices.

I contend the next era of supplier diversity will be to bring those environment and social efforts together:

• To help companies that offer environmental products and services understand the financial benefits of tapping into the burgeoning group of certified, diverse businesses; and
• To help women- and minority-owned businesses understand the financial benefits of developing procedures that address environmental risks and benefits.

It’s a challenge only in that the two groups are so focused on their own efforts that sometimes it’s possible to not see the additional opportunities that integration can bring.

But from what I’ve experienced, the common factors in both of these initiatives are innovation and cooperation. The combination of the two has the potential to create a powerful workforce – some might call them “green collar jobs” – that can address a myriad of both local and global issues.  
Supplier diversity economically equips historically under-utilized population groups by engaging their biggest source of income, employers. In most cases, these population groups work for diverse-owned companies. You do business with these firms and they pay wages and salaries that support the purchase of goods and services from the very corporations that have supplier diversity initiatives. It is a circular economic flow that helps the corporations, the diverse-owned businesses and the historically under-utilized communities support themselves in a positive manner. 
And isn’t that what sustainability is all about?

Reginald Layton is the director of diversity business development for Johnson Controls, Inc.